If somebody wants to wear tight jeans, how can they do that, if the jeans that were tight in store expand afterwards? Surely you can't buy a size smaller because then you can't wear them to break them.
70s and 80s movies come to mind where girls would be getting ready and lie down on the bed and suck in to get the button buttoned. Dazed and Confused comes to mind where they literally use a pair of pliers to put up the zipper because its so tight. Until you break it in, you are just having to suffer. Once they put elastic into jeans, people jumped on it because its just easier. I love my old-style selvedge denim, but it is more work and care than throwaway stuff.
The answer is literally, with great difficulty. Anything tight that needs to be broken in is reaaally tight at first. But when there's a will, there's a way.
How about when Carter made peace between Egypt and Israel? Carter also gave the canal back to Panama and normalized ties with China.
Carter may not have won the FIFA Peace Prize. But he did win the Nobel one. My father respected Carter more than almost any other living person, and I trust his judgement.
No, they didn’t, and if your media tells you that’s what’s happening, it’s either misinformed or propaganda (or both).
Our political left already thinks we’re the bad guys. Our political right is posting pictures of eagles on Facebook. Nobody feels any different than they did yesterday.
Why? It really isn’t anything new. The only new thing is the admission it is for oil, which we usually pretend it isn’t.
Those of us who are opposed to it probably didn’t vote for Trump and surely have no foreign policy influence, which is the same as when Bush invaded Iraq. Same old song and dance.
This isn’t out of line with past performance. We have spent decades toppling regimes. Basically since WW2.
Hows this any different than what we did to Noriega? Saddam? Qaddafi?
That’s my original point, to anyone who is paying attention it’s already been priced in. The method was novel perhaps, but nothing else about it was anything different. I’m not that old and I’ve already seen it happen several times.
If somebody punches you in the face from Monday through Friday, then they punch you in the face on Saturday you probably don’t feel any different about them on Sunday.
I certainly can’t say I expected the exact method of capture, but I had no doubt all of those carriers were moving to the Caribbean for some reason other than show. I figured we would just blow some stuff up and topple the regime that way.
I would guess not at all for any of them. Drugs clearly aren’t that much of the reason involved here. If you were listing the countries that export the most drugs to us, Venezuela wouldn’t even be top five. I am not sure I would be opposed to us taking out cartel leaders in Mexico, but there are certainly a lot of downsides to it that have held us back. I don’t think Gloria Shienbaum is on our enemies list.
What they have that we care about is a third of the world’s oil reserves. They are friendly with our biggest geopolitical rival, China. This is not to endorse what we did at all, but it’s pretty clear that there is a future coming where oil gets scarce, and the last thing we want is China to have a better supply of it than us.
I don’t think this was probably the right way to solve the problem, but it is a problem that needed to be solved, and even though I don’t like it, I have to admit there is a lot of upside.
Going by the historical record the chances of a mess are larger than the chances of a net positive. One thing is for sure: the US reputation abroad just sunk a little lower and it really did not need that.
Certainly possible. There are plenty of examples where these sorts of interventions worked for the country we intervened in though. Even in Latin America, which I’ve travelled extensively. I’ve talked to them about it.
A year ago today I was in Grenada looking at a statue of Reagan. The Grenadians love America (and the older ones love to tell you about it) for our intervention in the 80’s which I was not old enough to remember. They did not want to become another Cuba and we saved them from it.
South Korea. Japan. Germany. There were some solid wins in our nation building along with the losses.
I think the shock is more of a shift from the lawful evil spectrum, where the US either did things covertly or had a much better narrative prepared, to chaotic evil. Apparently Congress had no clue here, and Trump simply called them "leakers".
To be more blunt, we knew America was a pompous asshole, but it always pretended to be orderly. This is the US putting in a toupe and plucking its mustache. The act isn't surprising, the shift in attitude is.
Enough money to not work and care for your children is the correct answer.
But sadly the people I know who made enough money to be able to retire young are workaholics that will hire people to raise their kids. Because their workaholism is what made them rich in the first place. See Elon for an extreme example, I doubt he can even name all his biological children.
All forms of education boil down to people putting in the time to engage their brain with the subject matter. Most organized education is based on coercing, peer pressure, or social pressure to get students in situations where they kind of have to engage e.g. in order to pass exams, or other exercises, or by being forced to listen to a teacher for a few hours in a class room.
Online education is not that different. You basically put in the time watching the videos and doing the homework and tests. The test and certificate become the goal.
Self study whether powered by LLMs or by good old books or whatever source of information, basically relies more on things like curiosity and discipline. Some people do this naturally.
The nice thing about LLMs is that they adapt to your curiosity and that it is easy to dumb down stuff to the point where you can understand things. Lots of people engage with LLMs this way. Some do that to feed their confirmation bias, some do it to satisfy their curiosity. Whatever the motivation, the net result is that you learn.
I think LLMs are still severely underused in education. We romanticize the engaged, wise, teacher that works their ass off to get students to see the light. But the reality is that a lot of teachers have to juggle a lot of not so interested students. Some of them aren't that great at the job to begin with. Burnouts are quite common among teachers. And there are a lot of students that fall through the cracks of the education system. I think there's some room there for creative teachers to lighten their workloads and free up more time to engage with students that need it.
I saw a teacher manually checking a students work on the train a few days ago. Nice red pen. Very old school work. She probably had dozens of such tests to review. I imagine you get quite efficient at it after a few decades. But feeding a pdf to chat GPT probably would generate a very thorough evaluation in seconds given some good criteria. She could probably cut a few hours of her day. There are all sorts of ways to leverage LLMs to help teachers or students here. Also plenty of ways for students to cheat. But there are ways to mitigate that.
Retention is an issue with education more generally (including the meatspace variety) but spaced-repetition systems (SRS) address it quite well. With online video, you can even prompt an LLM to provide a suggested distillation of the content into Q&A flashcards.
watching a few good videos is a great way to FEEL like you're learning. just cuz you watch a 15 hour videoo course on c doesn't mean you can write c any more than watching a 2 hour video course on kung foo means you can kick like bruce lee
The best Elearning platform I've found is mathacademy. no videos. just short texts on how to solve a problem and then a bunch of problems with increasing difficulty. much more efficent if you want to actually learn a skill.
Kinda tangential but in the advent of AI I feel like there won’t be a niche for “handcrafted software”.
When quartz watches came up the makers of mechanical watches struggled. Quartz watches are cheaper, more accurate in many cases and servicing is usually restricted to replacing a battery. However some people appreciate a good mechanical watch (and the status symbol aspect of course) and nowadays the mechanical watch market is flourishing. Something similar happened with artificial fabrics (polyester, acrylic) and cheap made clothes, there’s a market for handmade clothes that use natural fabrics.
Nobody (well, barring a few HN readers) will ever care if the software was written by people or a bot, as long as it works.
Or maybe it's like someone saying homecooked meals and professional chefs are outdated because McDonalds exists. Homecooked meals are cheaper and healthier, and professional chefs still make better food. I don't think McDonalds is about to disappear, but I'm pretty sure those other categories aren't about to become obsolete any time soon.
I disagree. It enables more people to build utility software without the pain of writing the boilerplate code for it. This should leave more room for their taste and expertise.
That's how it works for me. I'm currently turning a lot of raw data into a map of Berlin rents. I spend less time figuring out the map API, and more time polishing the interesting parts.
I don't care if a craftsman used hand tools or a CNC to build beautiful furniture. I pay for taste, not toil.
Watches are a horrible example. The rich buy them because they're a status symbol. Rich people aren't going to start retaining teams of software experts just for status.
"Mechanical watches" also aren't exploding at all. When people cite this, they're citing the overall watch market growing, because the market for million dollar watches is being driven by a very small group of collectors. Its also not sustainable, and will die down in ~10-20 years when these old guys finish dying. The average not rich person could not give less of a damn about mechanical watches. There's no great comeback on the horizon
It's laughable that LLMs can be considered more accurate than human operators at the macro level. Sure, if I ask a search bot the date Notre Dame was built, it'll get it right more often than me, but if I ask it to write even a simple heap memory allocator, it's going to vomit all over itself.
> Nobody [...] will ever care if the software was written by people or a bot, as long as it works
Yeah.. wake me up when LLMs can produce even nominally complex pieces software that are on-par with human quality. For anything outside of basic web apps, we're a long way off.
I mean, so do I, if you think about it like that. I just have a much lower chance of successfully retrieving the correct information.
In the comparison I was making with respect to accuracy was that the bot is much more likely to accurately answer fact-based queries, and much less likely to succeed at any tasks that require actual 'thinking'. Especially when that task is not particularly common in the training set, such as writing a memory allocator. I can write and debug a simple allocator in half an hour, no worries. I'd be surprised if any of the current LLMs could.
In this niche forum people keep saying “there’s no moat”. But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT.
Does Coca Cola have a moat? Some company could raise $1B to create a new cola beverage that beats Coca Cola in all blind tests imaginable yet people will keep buying Coca Cola.
Did people switch search engines or social networks when Google or FB introduced ads?
I wouldn't call ChatGPT "brand recognition". People know the term ChatGPT, but I don't think they associate it with OpenAI or any company in particular, in the same way that people might associate Civic with Honda. Instead they'll associate it like they do the terms Bandaid, Kleenex, etc., as a catch-all term for LLM chat interfaces, regardless of who is providing the service. When OpenAI starts ads, I imagine people will start saying "oh, here's a ChatGPT without ads" and point to Claud or Gemini or whatever.
> But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT.
Brand recognition doesn't mean a thing when it comes to a technically-illiterate audience with no control over their digital lives. In the same way that every 90s mom called a video game console a "Nintendo", everyone who gets served an LLM-generated response straight from their OS and/or browser courtesy of Google, Apple, or Microsoft will call that a "ChatGPT", and OpenAI will be powerless to stop the platform holders from intercepting their traffic.
> Hard disagree. If anything brand recognition is more important for technically illiterate.
No, the tech-illiterate gravitate towards the path of least resistance, which just means the platform defaults. OpenAI doesn't control the platform, which means they've already lost to Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Don't build your castle in someone else's kingdom.
> And this proves that point. Nintendo sales in the 1990s crushed the competitors numbers.
Clearly you know nothing about the history of the console business, because Sony absolutely annihilated Nintendo in the home console market for the decade between 1995 and 2005, despite Nintendo's brand strength.
> No, the tech-illiterate gravitate towards the path of least resistance, which just means the platform defaults.
The path of least resistance is by way of brand recognition.
> OpenAI doesn't control the platform
OpenAI has 800mm MAUs on their own platform that they control, assuming we trust their reporting. They own chat.com, all of our grandmothers know ChatGPT - they don't know Gemini...I'm not even sure how OpenAI could have lost to Apple or Microsoft in the AI race. Those are nonsensical comparisons.
> Sony absolutely annihilated Nintendo in the home console market for the decade between 1995 and 2005
Yes you're right. If we shift the comparison window by a full 50% the numbers do favor Sony.
My point is not that OpenAI is infallible or that a competitor couldn't also be successful. Only that brand recognition is a legitimate and important factor.
I don’t disagree but want to go on the record predicting this will collapse on itself spectacularly and OpenAI will still “fail” commercially
for the Cola Cola drinkers, the product goes from an infallible AI to with no ulterior motives to another Google that’s purpose is to sell you ads, but more creepily. it’s like if Coca Cola started adding a few milliliters of bleach to their product
This isn’t backed by the constant conspiracy theories about voice assistants listening to everything you say and then farming that off to third party ad providers so that you see ads for things you’ve been discussing.
I’m not certain about that, but it’s all very abstract to people. It is also tied to their phones for most people which they’d never give up anyway.
The more direct connection on something they don’t (yet) value as much as they value their phones might be a bridge too far.
An LLM feels like a person to a lot of people. It might be surprisingly difficult to avoid people feeling betrayed or creeped out by this “person”. No one has ever done this before and it doesn’t seem easy or like a straightforward win.
It is odd how often I hear even technically people defend the idea that Instagram is listening to everything they say even while the phone is locked, sending it to Meta, and then influencing their ad delivery. You have to either have very little understanding of mobile apps and reverse engineering to believe that this is happening but nobody has been able to find proof yet.
It’s right up there with people who believe conspiracies about everyday things like chemtrails. If you really though chemtrails were disbursing toxic mind control chemicals (or whatever they’re supposed to be this week) then you’d be going to great lengths to breathe only purified air and relocate to another location with fewer flight paths. Yet the chemtrail conspiracy theorists don’t change their behavior. They just like complaining and being angry, and it’s something they can bond with other angry complainers about.
I think it’s more reasonable to consider Coca Cola as having a significant brand value moat, given that they’re 140 years old and one of the most recognizable brands in the world. That also gets at the other side of their moat: distribution. Coca Cola is available basically everywhere, and a challenger would have to invest massively to simply get in front of as many people on shelves. In that way, other companies (Google, Microsoft, Meta) still have significant legs up on OpenAI. Way too much in play right now to declare any winners.
There’s a difference between something that has existed for a few years that lots of people have heard of, and something that people have been buying their entire lives, and that their grandparents also bought for their entire lives. As to distribution—the internet certainly makes it logistically easier to get your product to consumers, but an infinitely large store shelf still means you’re competing for consumer attention, and the big players already have that attention for their existing successful products.
Don't ask them if they know the model name, ask them if they've used the ai mode in Google search or their phone or Gmail or whatever. "Oh yeah I use that all the time!" is what they usually say to me.
People say ChatGPT has brand recognition but amongst non-students and non-tech in the UK I don't think it is that pervasive at least.
Western Europe is fine, for seniors as well as newcomers, based on my own experience and friends & acquaintances. Then based on more acquaintances South America and Asia seems OK too. But again, ensure you actually understand the context here.
What does "heinous" actually mean here? I've repeated it before, but I guess one more time can't hurt: I'm not saying it isn't difficult to find a job as a developer today compared to a decade ago, but what I am saying is that it's a thing across all sectors and developers aren't hit by it worse than any other sector. Hiring freezes has been happening in not just technology companies, but across the board.
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