[–] 3 points 6 months ago*

How much does he think an engineer spends on CAD tools, anyway? Altium is like, what, $2500 / year? Very "how much can a banana cost".

It's all capital costs for tools, pretty much, anyway, maybe CAD should start charging per net lmao.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago*

    Oh they are going to charge per token for github copilot? That thing is a money waste for everyone, I'm pretty sure. I get a mix of inane mildly good suggestions, irrelevant stuff, and an occasional suggestion of super evil sabotage. Due to mild OCD about issues, I tend to have to fix said mildly good suggestions, but from the objective perspective that nitpickery is not worth it, everything was fine without, we had compiler warnings, coverity, etc.

    edit: the difference being that the old stuff was deterministic and you just ran it on the whole codebase and had it pass. Unlike gh copilot that'll just make up new shit. And as for the times it caught some bad bug that you made... add more tests instead.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago*

    I wouldn't be too surprised if they really don't, they're just advertising the advertising lol.

    edit: Basically what if you spent a trillion dollars so that you could beam ads to people's bathroom mirrors. And better yet, ads reflected from water down in their toilets. Then in the interest of expediency you just take random ads and put them there for free, and your actual product, shares, sells better.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 child)

    It's kind of ridiculous on its face. Yudkowsky was never some guy making money off writing code or any other "nerdy" activity (even though people doing that can be as sociopathic as anyone else). Pre-HPMoR part of his career is just "does sociopathy for a living". After, too, but like with a bit of branching out into book writing.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    Interesting he mentions that Kyle Hill guy, the only reason I know about him is shilling on behalf of nuclear grifters (example of nuclear grift: Oklo: a startup with no reactor designs, publicly traded with peak market cap of $25 billion and an origin story in a ponzi scheme).

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago* (2 children)

    I think it's not very difficult to construct a really shitty small reactor that is horrendously expensive per watt. Can probably be built in a year if you get rid of NRC and just half ass it completely.

    I mean, Demon Core was a small reactor. You pretty much have to do a lot of work to ensure you won't create a small reactor when a truckload of fresh fuel falls into a river.

    What's difficult is making a safe reactor that is actually making electricity at somewhat reasonable price per watt.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago*

    I don't think getting rid of elections would work. Dictatorships do not rely on election rigging alone. That's just interventionist propaganda (barge in, set up elections, presto, democracy).

    Competent dictators don't act anything like Trump. Once in power they try to obtain support of as wide of a section of the population as possible. There's no freedom of speech in a dictatorship; the dictator is giving prepared speeches, designed to bolster his support, to unify the nation, etc, not just having fun gloating at half the nation's expense.

    If he actually tries to maintain power despite his relative unpopularity, the consequences will be utterly disastrous.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Shorting the market requires precise timing. Being early is just as bad as being wrong.

    Exactly. It is not enough to know that a company stock will go down. It is necessary to know that it will never go higher than a certain point above the current value (not even momentarily) before it goes down. If you have a fuckload of other people's money you can just keep double-or-nothing-ing it, that's what banks were doing to gamestop, except that this can sometimes cause the stock to go even higher (a short squeeze), which would make you (who doesn't actually have a fuckload of other people's money) lose all of your money.

    edit: also the other concerning possibility is that stock prices can go up simply due to the dollar going down.

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  •  

    There's a very long history of extremely effective labor saving tools in software.

    Writing in C rather than Assembly, especially for more than 1 platform.

    Standard libraries. Unix itself. More recently, developing games in Unity or Unreal instead of rolling your own engine.

    And what happened when any of these tools come on the scene is that there is a mad gold rush to develop products that weren't feasible before. Not layoffs, not "we don't need to hire junior developers any more".

    Rank and file vibe coders seem to perceive Claude Code (for some reason, mostly just Claude Code) as something akin to the advantage of using C rather than Assembly. They are legit excited to code new things they couldn't code before.

    Boiling the rivers to give them an occasional morale boost with "You are absolutely right!" is completely fucked up and I dread the day I'll have to deal with AI-contaminated codebases, but apart from that, they have something positive going for them, at least in this brief moment. They seem to be sincerely enthusiastic. I almost don't want to shit on their parade.

    The AI enthusiast bigwigs on the other hand, are firing people, closing projects, talking about not hiring juniors any more, and got the media to report on it as AI layoffs. They just gleefully go on about how being 30% more productive means they can fire a bunch of people.

    The standard answer is that they hate having employees. But they always hated having employees. And there were always labor saving technologies.

    So I have a thesis here, or a synthesis perhaps.

    The bigwigs who tout AI (while acknowledging that it needs humans for now) don't see AI as ultimately useful, in the way in which C compiler was useful. Even if its useful in some context, they still don't. They don't believe it can be useful. They see it as more powerfully useless. Each new version is meant to be a bit more like AM or (clearly AM-inspired, but more familiar) GLaDOS, that will get rid of all the employees once and for all.

     

    They train on sneer-problems now:

    Here’s the “ferry‑shuttle” strategy, exactly analogous to the classic two‑ferryman/many‑boats puzzle, but with planes and pilots

    And lo and behold, singularity - it can solve variants that no human can solve:

    https://chatgpt.com/share/68813f81-1e6c-8004-ab95-5bafc531a969

    Two ferrymen and three boats are on the left bank of a river. Each boat holds exactly one man. How can they get both men and all three boats to the right bank?

     

    I think this summarizes in one conversation what is so fucking irritating about this thing: I am supposed to believe that it wrote that code.

    No siree, no RAG, no trickery with training a model to transform the code while maintaining identical expression graph, it just goes from word-salading all over the place on a natural language task, to outputting 100 lines of coherent code.

    Although that does suggest a new dunk on computer touchers, of the AI enthusiast kind, you can point at that and say that coding clearly does not require any logical reasoning.

    (Also, as usual with AI it is not always that good. sometimes it fucks up the code, too).

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