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The Wright brothers are idiots, if it were me I'd have made a supersonic jet from the get go and not waste my time mucking around with prototypes.

The prototype phase meant data centers are now measured in MW instead of TFLOPS.

At a time where we were desperate to reduce emissions, data centers now consume around 20% of the energy consumed by the entire aviation sector, with consumption is rising at 15% YoY.

Never mind the water required to cool them, or the energy and resources required to build them, the capital allocation, and the opportunity cost of not allocating all of that to something else.

And this is, your words, the prototype phase.


Emissions and Energy consumed do not necessarily have to be linked up.

We have plenty of ways to make clean energy, it is only matter of incentives.

As long as burning coal is simply cheaper, business will burn coal.


The computing power in a crappy cheap modern phone used to fill up a warehouse and cost a ton of energy, relatively. Moore's law might not remain steadfast, but if history is any indication, we'll find a way to make the technology more efficient.

So, yes, prototypes often use more energy than the final product. That doesn't mean we shouldn't sustainable build datacenters, but that's conflating issues.


the Wright brothers sold me a subscription to a supersonic jet and I've got a bundle of matchsticks and some canvas.

On the other hand, flight is ubiquitous and has changed everything.

Flight changed everything when it comes to warfare. But as far as individuals are concerned, the average human on the planet will take a handful of flights in their lifetime, at best, and nearly all flights that are taken are for recreation which is ultimately fungible with other forms of recreation that don't involve taking flights, and of the flights that aren't for recreation most could be replaced by things like video calls, and the vast and overwhelming majority of the goods that make up the lifeblood of the global economy are still shipped by ship, not shipped by air.

Which is to say, the commercial aviation industry could permanently collapse tomorrow and it would have only a marginal impact on most people's lives, who would just replace planes with train, car, or boat travel. The lesson here is that even if normal people experience some tangential beneficial effects from LLMs, their most enduring legacy will likely be to entrench authority and cement the existing power structures.


It's silly to say that the ability to fly has not changed society. Or that it won't continue to change society, if we manage to become space-faring before ruining our home planet.

The phrase, "The average human on the planet will take a handful of flights in their lifetime" is doing a lot of work. What are those flights to? How meaningful/important were the experiences? What cultural knowledge was exchanged? What about crucial components that enable industries we depend on? For example, a nuclear plant might constantly be ordering parts that are flown in overnight.

In general you're really minimizing the importance of aviation without really providing anything to back up your claims.


We were promised supersonic jets today or very soon though and our economies have been held hostage waiting for that promise.

The passive voice is doing a lot of work in your sentence.

We are perpetually just months away from software jobs being obsolete.

AGI was achieved internally at OpenAI a year ago.

Multiple companies have already re-hired staff they had fired and replaced with AI.

etc.


Your problem is thinking that hype artists, professionals and skeptics are all the same voice with the same opinion. Because of that, you can't recognize when sentiment is changing among the more skeptical.

You are responding to some voices in your head, not to the context of the conversation.

You're also presuming too much about what I'm thinking and being dead wrong about that.


I am responding to what you wrote:

> We are perpetually just months away from software jobs being obsolete.

only hype artists are saying this. and you're using it as a way to negate the argument of more skeptical people.


Functional illiteracy and lack of any capacity to hold any context longer than two sentences has long been a plague on HN. Now that we've outsourced our entire thinking process to "@grok is this true", it has now claimed almost the entirety of human race.

soulofmischief: complains that AI-skeptics would say the Wright brothers were idiots because they didn't imediately implement a supersonic jet

ares623: we were promised supersonic jets today or very soon (translation: AI hype and scam artists have already promised a lot now)

eru: The passive voice is doing a lot of work in your sentence. (Translation: he questions the validity of ares623's statement)

me: Here are just three examples of hype and scam promising the equivalent of super jet today, with some companies already being burned by these promises.

soulofmischief: some incoherent rambling


Apply your own "functional literacy". I made a clarification that those outside of an industry have to separate the opinions of professionals and hype artists.

The irony of your comment would be salient, if it didn't feel like I was speaking with a child. This conversation is over, there's no reason to continue speaking with you as long you maintain this obnoxious attitude coupled with bad reading comprehension.


Your posts here remind me of Trumpists citing random Twitter leftists as Democratic party leaders.

Lol. "random leftists"

First two come directly from OpenAI, Anthropic and others

Last one is literally made rounds even on HN e.g. Klarna bringing back their support staff after they tried to replace them with AI.


The AI bubble will pop any month now.

See? I can do this too.


The first recorded supersonic flight was in 1947.

Supersonic passenger planes failed commercially.

It's funny watching people rediscover well-established paradigms. Suddenly everyone's recreating software design documents [0].

People can say what they want about LLMs reducing intelligence/ability; The trend has clearly been that people are beginning to get more organized, document things better, enforce constraints, and think in higher-level patterns. And there's renewed interest in formal verification.

LLMs will force the skilled, employable engineer to chase both maintainability and productivity from the start, in order to maintain a competitive edge with these tools. At least until robots replace us completely.

[0] https://www.atlassian.com/work-management/knowledge-sharing/...


The thing is that currently most of these projects are just done by engineers, Its easy to stay organized when the project lasts couple of weeks and stays within <5 engineers. The issues starts when the software starts living longer and you add in the modern agile practices, it comes a complete mess which each PM trying to add random features on top of the existing code. As you increase more and more code, the maintainability will just become impossible.

I am aware that software complexity scales. That is literally why I suggested that having good standards from the start is becoming increasingly important.

The answer to whatever perceived (unfounded) overlap between gun owners to potential ICE agents is not to encourage or condone more prejudice and ostracization of the people who do not fall in both categories via speech that lumps them in with the others anyway.

That's a very disrespectful way to recognize and appreciate them.


That is biased.

Many of us own guns precisely to defend ourselves and our countrymen in the event of civil chaos. That's what the second amendment is for.

Most true leftists I know are armed. Don't forget what Karl Marx said about an armed populace. We are in some serious shit and this kind of divisive attitude is not productive.


Let us know when you take your guns to defend Minnesota. Or are the actions being committed there by the government not a sufficient amount of "civil chaos" for you to take action? I just wish gun owners were honest. You're not here to defend anyone or anything. You just like to make small holes in paper targets.

Individual vigilante action is not the answer. Collectivization, political organization is. Guns are for self-defense and armed conflict. I can't solve this problem on my own, until there is mass collectivization then I'm only an individual and cannot just go around taking on a rogue authoritarian government. That's absurd. Besides, I personally have physical handicaps, I'm not Batman. And I spoke for leftists. I cannot control what other people do. But divisive crap like this is not helping to unify anything.

> I just wish gun owners were honest. You're not here to defend anyone or anything. You just like to make small holes in paper targets.

You literally know nothing about me and are making assumptions about how I think and operate based on a single fact you think you know about me. That is textbook prejudice. All you're doing is showing that you don't understand the point of the Bill of Rights or what checks and balances it takes to uphold a fair government.

I'll pull the Karl Marx quote for you.

“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary”

You have some deprogramming to do.


Some people care about good institutions and would like to preserve them.

Why not just use WARC and a program that can read them? Do archives need to be human-readable?

The thing about archives is you either parse them now or parse them later. With how much JS and other crap is served in modern social media frontends, I'm not sure WARC is the best format for archiving from them.

But that is the point of WARC: otherwise, your archival method need some sort of general inteligence (ai or human behind the scenes) to store exacly what you need.

With WARC (and good WARC tooling like Browsetrix-crawler) you store everything HTTP the site sent.


I'm confident that they can. This isn't a new idea. Something like this would be a walk in the park for Opus 4.5 in the right harness.

Of course it likely still needs a skilled pair of eyes and a steady hand to keep it on track or keep things performant, but it's an iterative process. I've already built my own ASCII rendering engines in the past, and have recently built one with a coding model, and there was no friction.


> skilled pair of eyes and a steady hand

But that's key here.

"A hammer and a chisel can build a 6ft wooden sculpture by themselves just fine .. as long as guided by a skilled pair of eyes and steady hands"


Ok, but if you have a wooden hammer and chisel, and a steel hammer and chisel, choosing the wooden one is an artisanal choice, not a practical one. These tools enable an amount of velocity I've never had before, both in research and development.

Opus 4.5 seems to be better than GPT 5.2 or 5.2 Codex at using tools and working for long stretches on complex tasks.

Renee Good was killed after dropping off her six-year-old child at school. I agree with you, but people like her have children and are not trying to die in the street just for looking at somebody the wrong way. And it's one thing to open carry, it's another thing to become a trained and confident marksmen.

And as someone who has had half a dozen police officers simultaneously pointing guns at my head, mistaking me for someone else in public, once you're in that situation, escalation is only going to lead to death. Out here, police shoot you if your hand goes anywhere near your waist.


It's a prediction algorithm that walks a high-dimensional manifold, in that sense all application of knowledge it just "search", so yes, you're fundamentally correct but still fundamentally wrong since you think this foundational truth is the end and beginning of what LLMs do, and thus your mental model does not adequately describe what these tools are capable of.

Me? My mental model? I gave an analogy for Claude not a explanation for LLMs.

But you know what? I was mentally thinking of both deep think / research and Claude code, both of which are literally closed loop. I see this is slightly off topic b/c others are talking about the LLM only.


Sorry, I should have said "analogy" and not "mental model", that was presumptuous. Maybe I also should have replied to the GP comment instead.

Anyway, since we're here, I personally think giving LLMs agency helps unlock this latent knowledge, as it provides the agent more mobility when walking the manifold. It has a better chance at avoiding or leaving local minima/maxima, among other things. So I don't know if agentic loops are entirely off-topic when discussing the latent power of LLMs.


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