> Maybe that would be my advice in taking up hobbies: aim to be better than the worst people who do it professionally.
I guess this is my gripe with advice in general: Why should anyone else make that their aim? It’s great that it works for you, but I don’t think that’s applicable to me :)
We don't have any evidence other than billions of biological intelligences already exist, and they tend to form lots of organizations with lots of resources. Also, AIs exist alongside other AIs and related technologies. It's similar to the gray goo scenario. But why think it's a real possibility given the world is already full of living things, and if gray goo were created, there would already be lots of nanotech that could be used to contain it.
The world we live in is the result of a gray goo scenario causing a global genocide. (Google Oxygen Holocaust.) So it kinda makes a poor argument that sudden global ecosystem collapses are impossible. That said, everything we have in natural biotech, while advanced, are incremental improvements on the initial chemical replicators that arose in a hydrothermal vent billions of years ago. Evolution has massive path dependence; if there was a better way to build a cell from the ground up, but it required one too many incremental steps that were individually nonviable, evolution would never find it. (Example: 3.7 billion years of evolution, and zero animals with a wheel-and-axle!) So the biosphere we have isn't very strong evidence that there isn't an invasive species of non-DNA-based replicators waiting in our future.
That said, if I was an ASI and I wanted to kill every human, I wouldn't make nanotech, I'd mod a new Covid strain that waits a few months and then synthesizes botox. Humans are not safe in the presence of a sufficiently smart adversary. (As with playing against Magnus Carlsen, you don't know how you lose, but you know that you will.)
As I understand the Wikipedia article, nobody quite knows why it took that long, but one hypothesis is that the oxygen being produced also killed the organisms producing it, causing a balance until evolution caught up. This will presumably not be an issue for AI-produced nanoswarms.
Huh. I like the slightly toasted bun and the generous amount of veggies they put in the Inn n Out burger. I’m not aware of a similar looking or tasting burger on the McDonald’s menu.
> It feels like cooking now requires commercial quality equipment only available to the Michelin star restaurants.
Why does AI make you feel this way? It feels the opposite to me — like meals that formerly required a master chef to make, but soon anyone can make for themselves at an acceptable level of quality with meal prep kits
A few months ago there was a post on HN about catching up to the current state of LLM dev and learning how to use it. In it there were recommendations for hardware - the lowest tier being a 3090/4090. When looking at the decision tree for even cheaper options, it basically said to find another hobby.
Not sure if that's changed but ever since seeing that line, I've been put off of that world. I still occasionally click on HN links advertising new methods which can be run on "consumer" cards and every time it's just a 3090/4090...
If we're still entertaining the above analogy, a home kitchen costs more than a PC with a 3090/4090.
But when I got into software in the 90s, it was about $4000 for just a run of the mill desktop PC, which is about $8000 in today's money. And it didn't even have 3d acceleration.
In the grand scheme of things, a 3090/4090 is not expensive.
A gas camping stove is like $50. A toaster oven is another $50-100. The best reviewed chefs knife on the market for commercial kitchens is $30.
You don’t need thousands of dollars to start cooking.
I have friends in the who cook on this stuff at home all the time. We in the west have elevated our kitchens into something luxurious. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s overkill for many people.
Please don't be discouraged by whatever "Big Tech" is doing.
Products that we build today represent many millions of decisions and trade-offs.
If you believe something should exist, please build it and don't worry about what anyone else is doing or saying.
I was working on an application in the early 2000's and learned that Gigantic Inc. launched something to solve the same problem. I immediately bowed out, and they immediately let that first-launched beta languish for more than 10 years with less staff than we had.
In the intervening years, another startup built a similar competitor and sold for hundreds of millions of dollars.
As another example, I eventually worked at Gigantic Inc, and the org that I was part of had been failing to deliver a useful product to the public for about 7 years, and continued to fail for many more. This was an organization with hundreds of people and many hundreds of millions of dollars of budget, and they were being absolutely clobbered by a combination of their own unbelievable incompetence and the brutality of the market around them.
One of the biggest lessons I've learned in my career, is to never assume that just because Big Tech has some budget, that they also have attention or competence.
Interesting, I actually feel the opposite. The scale at which big tech apps have to operate leads to a lot of bad UX and more bugs due to complexity. For example you can typically get much lower latency hosting a web app at or near your home than Google can provide.
Wow, hello hyperbole and loaded terms. If we can’t even agree on basic facts like the very existence of a war, then there’s simply no point in discussion.
I agree. So long as all you know is Israeli propaganda, you're blinded to the truth and there's no point in discussion.
If there's a war, where is the army that the IDF is fighting? How many losses have the IDF had? Where is the front-line of this war? Where is the footage of this so called "war"?
The Hamas military is embedded in the civilian population, as everyone knows. IDF has sustained minimal losses after getting their act together after Oct 7th, but if your definition of war precludes one sided casualties, then I guess operation Desert Storm wasn’t part of a war. If you need a very explicit front line, then I guess the Vietnam and Iraq wars weren’t wars either.
These answers are obvious. You would’ve been able to answer your questions yourself if you were earnestly looking to do so.
I guess this is my gripe with advice in general: Why should anyone else make that their aim? It’s great that it works for you, but I don’t think that’s applicable to me :)
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