I'd argue the opposite.. For example in this case of they roll it out without tearing and something catastrophic happens. The faith in the tech will not be restored for generations, regardless of how much testing is done. Better to have these things working out the door straight away Instead of risking literal lives.
We just need some major wars or implacable ideological enemies to force us to test in prod. The biggest tech leaps happen there, because there’s no alternative.
Not at all, few years, at most a decade behind. Don't you feel a decade ago we had a bit better life? Many people think so. What did we gain? Certainly not mature usable self-driving tech.
Anyway giving a choice of bleeding tech or being slightly more conservative tech is something that is taken away by people like Musk. Maybe you prefer being such a choice-less 'slave' to the system and uber rich just to have some shiny new toy a bit earlier, most people don't and many systems consider it outright illegal.
I don't get how tesla is not already sued in Europe for massive frauds they did and do on their customers. I'll happily buy electric car in future but hell will freeze sooner than my family sponsoring those nazi cars, competition is pretty good these days.
> Though this faction can’t articulate exactly how or why, they proclaim quite confidently that it will solve all of the machine world’s problems.
AGI can solve the human world’s problems. Perhaps not all of them, but all the biggest ones.
Right now life is hell.
You and your loved ones have a 100% chance of dying from cancer, unless your heart or brain kills you first, or perhaps a human-driven vehicle or an auto-immune disease gets there soonest.
And you’re poor. You’re unimaginably resource-constrained, given all the free energy and unused matter you’re surrounded by 24/7/365.
And you’re ignorant as heck. There’s all this knowledge your people have compiled and you’ve only made like 0.1% of the possible connections within what you already have in front of you.
Even just solving for these 3 things is enough to solve “all” the world’s problems, for some definitions of “all”.
Recently I uploaded a lab report to chatGPT and asked it to summarize it.
It hallucinated serious cancer, along with all the associated details you’d normally find on a lab report. It had an answer to every question I had pre-asked about the report.
Sigh. This is a point in favor of not allowing free access to ChatGPT at all given that people are getting mad at GPT-4o-mini which is complete garbage for anything remotely complex... and garbage for most other things, too.
Just give 5 free queries of 4o/o3 or whatever and call it good.
Or a non-normie. Even while logged in, I had no idea what ChatGPT model it was using, since it doesn't label it. All the label says is "great for everyday tasks".
And as a non-normie, I obviously didn't take its analysis seriously, and compared it to Grok and Gemini 2.5. The latter was the best.
I wonder if it was unable to read your report, and just answered as if role-playing?
I gave it a pdf of an engine manual recently and asked some questions, which it answered reasonably. It even pulled a schematic out for me, though it was the wrong one (it gave me a schematic for the CDI ignition variant that we first talked about, rather than the DSAI one we settled on later.)
Other Key Metrics
Absolute Neutrophils, Lymphocytes, Monocytes, Eosinophils, Basophils: All within normal ranges, suggesting no significant abnormalities in immune cell populations.
Anisocytosis (1+): Indicates variation in red blood cell size.
Hypochromasia (1+): Suggests pale red blood cells, supporting iron-deficiency anemia.
Summary
These results suggest iron-deficiency anemia, characterized by low hemoglobin, low MCV, low MCH, and high RDW. The elevated red blood cell count may reflect compensatory mechanisms or mild dehydration.
Your provider recommends a heart-healthy, low-fat diet, which is great for overall health. However, addressing the anemia might also involve increasing dietary iron or taking iron supplements.
The diagnosis is wrong, btw, I don't have iron deficiency. The anemia is caused by a genetic condition called thalassemia, which has been verified by genetic tests. You can use the Mentzer Index to differentiate the two on a simple CBC - https://www.mdcalc.com/calc/10534/mentzer-index
Mine numbers return a "probable diagnosis."
I was wondering if chatgpt would catch it, nope, it didn't. It did say that it was a possibility once I suggested it though.
It's also disappointing that the LLM would falsely claim that a low-fat diet is "great for overall health". That claim has been thoroughly debunked in the scientific literature (or at least not supported by evidence-based medicine), and yet the recommendation still keeps popping up. While there are certain specific types of fats that can be problematic, in general a moderate amount of fat is fine as a macronutrient.
LLMs don't have a magical ability to arbitrate complex truths. If the "low-fat diet" narrative is prominent in the training literature, I would expect the model to say that more often that it said the opposite.
I don't ever really use the term "thoroughly debunked" when referring to nutrition science; as you noted, a better term is that the claim is not supported by the evidence. I've seen enough things debunked and then rebunked to know that nutrition science is not really that accurate.
What was the outcome (did the subject of the lab report go on to present cancer)?
(sometimes what we think is a false positive ends up being a true positive later, and cancer is a late-arriving signal).
I dunno, cancer is complicated. I'd have to see the details to make that judgement. It really depends on a lot of factors- what the nature of the sample was, what the lab report did, etc.
Asking HN this is like asking which smartphone to use. You'll get suggestions for obscure Linux-based modular phones that weigh 6 kilos and lack a clock app or wifi. But they're better because they're open source or fully configurable or whatever. Or a smartphone that a fellow HNer created in his basement and plans to sell soon.
Cursor and Windsurf are both good, but do what most people do and use Cursor for a month to start with.
haha so on point! In the HN world, backend are written in Rust with formal proof and frontend are in pure JS and maybe Web Components. In the real world however, a lot of people are using different tech
Except for the crowd of extreme purists on HN where the backend is written in their divine C language by programmers blessed with an inability to ever have bugs that make it to production. Ad where the frontend is pure HTML because JavaScript is the language the devil speaks.
I've always understood it more to mean, "phenomena that happen due to the interactions of a system's parts without being explicitly encoded into their individual behavior." Fractal patterns in nature are a great example of emergent phenomena. A single water molecule contains no explicit plan for how to get together with its buddies and make spiky hexagon shapes when they get cold.
And I've always understood talking about emergence as if it were some sort of quasi-magical and unprecedented new feature of LLMs to mean, "I don't have a deep understanding of how machine learning works." Emergent behavior is the entire point of artificial neural networks, from the latest SOTA foundation model all the way back to the very first tiny little multilayer perceptron.
Emergence in the context of LLMs is really just us learning that "hey, you don't actually need intelligence to do <task>, turns out it can be done using a good enough next token predictor. We're basically learning what intelligence isn't as we see some of the things these models can do.
I always understood this to be the initial framing, e.g. in the Language Models are Few Shot Learners paper but then it got flipped around.
Or maybe you need intelligence to be a good enough next token predictor. Maybe the thing that “just” predicts the next token can be called “intelligence”.
The challenge there would be showing that humans have this thing called intelligence. You yourself are just outputting ephemeral actions that rise out of your subconscious. We have no idea what that system feeding our output looks like (except it's some kind of organic neural net) and hence there isn't really a basis for discriminating what is and isn't intelligent besides "if it solves problems, it has some degree of intelligence"
If you want to understand how birds fly, the fact that planes also fly is near useless. While a few common aerodynamic principles apply, both types of flight are so different from each other that you do not learn very much about one from the other.
On the other hand, if your goal is just "humans moving through the air for extended distances", it doesn't matter at all that airplanes do not fly the way birds do.
And then, on the generated third hand, if you need the kind of tight quarters maneuverability that birds can do in forests and other tangled spaces, then the way our current airplanes fly is of little to no use at all, and you're going to need a very different sort of technology than the one used in current aircraft.
And on the accidentally generated fourth hand, if your goal is "moving very large mass over very long distance", the the mechanisms of bird flight are likely to be of little utility.
The fact that two different systems can be described in a similar way (e.g. "flying") doesn't by itself tell you that they are working in remotely the same way or capable of the same sorts of things.
doesn't by itself tell you that they are working in remotely the same way or capable of the same sorts of things.
I believe any intelligence that reaches 'human level' should be capable of nearly the same things with tool use, the fact it accomplishes the goal in a different way doesn't matter because the systems behavior is generalized. Hence the term (artificial) general intelligence. Two different general intelligences built on different architectures should be able to converge on similar solutions (for example solutions based on lowest energy states) because they are operating in the same physical realm.
An AGI and an HGI should be able to have convergent solutions for fast air travel, ornithopters, and drones.
There is no "human level" because we don't even understand what we mean by "human level". We don't know what metrics to use, we don't even know what to measure.
> Two different general intelligences built on different architectures should be able to converge on similar solutions (for example solutions based on lowest energy states) because they are operating in the same physical realm.
Lots of things connected to intelligence do not operate (much) in any physical realm.
Also, you've really missed the point of the analogy. It's not a question of whether AGI would pick the same solution for fast air travel as HGI. It is that there are least two solutions to the challenge of moving things through the air in a controlled way, and they don't really work in the same way at all. Consequently, we should be ready for the possibility that there is more than one way to do the things LLMs (and to some degree) humans do with text/language, and that they may not be related to each very much. This is a counter to the claim that "since LLMs get so close to human language behavior, it seems quite likely human language behavior arises from a system like an LLM".
A better bird analogy would be if we didn't understand at all how flight worked, and then started throwing rocks and had pseudo-intellectuals saying "how do we know that isn't all that flight is, we've clearly invented artificial flight".
Not quite. Complex systems can exhibit macroscopic properties not evident at microscopic scales. For example, birds self organize into flocks, an emergent phenomenon, visible to the untrained eye. Our understanding of how it happens does not change the fact that it does.
There is a field of study for this called statistical mechanics.
I understood it to mean properties of large-scale systems that are not properties of its components. Like in thermodynamics: zooming in to a molecular level, you can reverse time without anything seeming off. Suddenly you get a trillion molecules and things like entropy appear, and time is not reversible at all.
Not at all. Here is an analogy: A car is a system which brings you from point A to B. No part of the car can bring you from point A to B. Not the seats, the wheels, not the frame, not even the motor. If you put the motor on a table, it won’t move one bit. The car, as a system, however does. The emergent property of a car, seen as a system, is that it brings you from one location to another.
A system is the product of the interaction of its parts. It is not the sum of the behaviour of its parts. If a system does not exhibit some form of emergent behaviour, it is not a system, but something else. Maybe an assembly.
If putting together a bunch of X's in a jar always makes the jar go Y, then is Y an emergent property?
Or we need to better understand why a bunch of X's in a jar do that, and then the property isn't emergent anymore, but rather the natural outcome of well-understood X's in a well-understood jar.
Ah. Not semantics, that is cybernetics and systems theory.
As in your example: If a bunch of x in a jar leads to the jar tipping over, it is not emergent. That’s just cause and effect. Problem to start with is that the jar containing x is not even a system in the first place, emergence as a concept is not applicable here.
There may be a misunderstanding on your side of the term emergence. Emergence does not equal non-understanding or some spooky-hooky force coming from the unknown. We understand the functions of the elements of a car quite well. The emergent behaviour of a car was intentionally brought about by massive engineering.
Reductionism does not lead to an explaining-away of emergence.
It's more specific than that. Most complex systems just produce noise. A few complex systems produce behavior that we perceive as simple. This is surprising, and gets the name "emergent".
It just means they haven't modeled the externalities. A plane on the ground isn't emergent. In the air it is, at least until you perfectly model weather, which you can't do, so its behavior is emergent. But I think a plane is also a good comparison because it shows that you can manage it; we don't have to perfectly model weather to still have fairly predictable air travel.
Most non-American movies are slop, melodramatic vaudeville, or tear-jerking gut-punches. Most American movies are slop too, but America can afford to swing at more pitches and consequently get more hits.
Have you ever tried to watch Korean movies from the last 20 years? It's all melodramatic romance-crime-poverty slop, with the rare Kim Ki-duk or Bong Joon Ho in there to balance it out. And that's a country with a wonderful reputation for quality film-making.
I mean you get zombies on a train and that's a fun popcorn flick, but it's forgettable. It's no Tremors, Twister, or Independence Day.
In Indonesia for every The Raid there's 999 poorly acted, poorly shot melodramas with a thin well-trodden story.
And don't get me started on "let's yell at each other for 120 minutes" Russian cinema.
American movies are by far the most watchable, especially when you don't feel like going on a heart-wrenching journey of despair, which is all international cinema excels at.
I didn't realize how many bad movies Italy produces, or at least produced, until I started living there in the late 1990s. Italians often go to the movies every week, and I did too, and then I realized that for every 'Life is Sweet', there were 50 dire entries that were just well-targeted enough to make their money back from a native audience. You'll never have heard of these movies, and rightly so.
Having lived in other countries since, this appears to be a common syndrome. You can't judge a country by its tourists, and you certainly can't judge it by the small number of movies that get past its border control.
Well said. Most people don't realize this. And likewise there's a Paris Syndrome that tourists sometimes have when first visiting America and expecting to step into a Hollywood movie. That subsides quickly.
That said, American movies pass border control to other countries all the time because of their broad appeal.
I'll say that I am less offended than some of my fellow commenters in this thread. I can hardly name 5 Belgian movies that I would suggest anyone to watch; Belgium has 1/30th of the US' population, but certainly a much, much smaller percentage of good movies.
Also, none of them are of the same 'appeal' as the American movies you cited, which are mostly action movies. The general populace wants to see big stunts and explosions, which require budget, local movies don't gross because they rely on local audiences, repeat ad infinitum. Most European movies that try to _look American_ in that sense fail horribly imo.
However, the ones I can name all have something in common: they wouldn't appeal to an international audience because there is something inherently 'local' to them. Not only language barriers (imagine reading subtitles) but also a certain 'European film aesthetic/tone' just like American blockbusters have theirs. American movies don't have the same 'local barrier' for Europeans because they are the norm and we're getting them force-fed by the 100bio Hollywood industrial complex: it's a movie, or it's a local movie.
Hollywood undoubtedly has more money, but you genuinely have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to the quality of what gets made.
So many things that hollywood produces are remakes of foreign movies, except with an order of magnitude more money poured in and palate-switched for american audiences. (which, due to the sheer volume of content that comes out of hollywood- becomes the default international palate).
The entertainment industry in Sweden (girl with the dragon tattoo, a man called Otto) and the UK (the countries I have lived in) is undoubtedly very strong, even comparatively poor (not intended as a slur here) India is quite famous for its bombastic action movies.
Russia too, has some of the most thought provoking movies that I've ever seen. Leviathan and Durak- they even have your "fun" action style movies (Brat and Brat 2 for fantastic examples).
To say that Hollywood produces more and thus sometimes better, and that other counties make slop betrays two things:
1) Hollywood steals vigorously from other countries.
2) Other countries produce works that do not translate well for american audiences.
Every country has 5 or 10 good movies you can name, and they're always the same ones. Brat and Brat 2, Leviathan and Durak... the list doesn't go on much beyond that. And certainly not in the last 20 years.
For US movies, the list goes on. And you can debate which ones should make the top-100.
But here's a pivotal soviet comedy about a guy who goes to the future... okay, here's Bob Zemeckis's Back to the Future. Compare the quality of any aspect: story, acting, props, costumes, cinematography, special fx, attention to detail, MUSIC... 1:1 US cinema destroys on every level.
Bollywood action movies? They're parodies of themselves- Adam Sandler's You Don't Mess with the Zohan, except they take themselves seriously.
> But here's a pivotal soviet comedy about a guy who goes to the future... okay, here's Bob Zemeckis's Back to the Future. Compare the quality of any aspect: story, acting, props, costumes, cinematography, special fx, attention to detail, MUSIC... 1:1 US cinema destroys on every level.
There's a Russian saying "no point in comparing finger with a dick". "Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession" was made in 1973 on a budget that was modest even by Soviet standards. It looks like a cheap TV movie for a reason: they reused existing sets and decorations from other movies. The few Hollywood sci-fi comedies of the early 1970s are of similar quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BOnUobhm6U
> "Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession" was made in 1973 on a budget that was modest even by Soviet standards. It looks like a cheap TV movie
To be fair, it looks just like any other Soviet movie from that era ("The Diamond Arm", "Afonya", "Shurik's Adventures", etc.), with the exception of the few that were considered "mega projects' by the government ("War and Peace").
I wouldn't call "Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession" that either. It's more of a "Blazing Saddles" type movie with a cult following due to its catchphrases, but overall, it isn't very good. Even among movies by the same director, some slightly earlier titles like "Kidnapping, Caucasian Style" and "The Diamond Arm" from the late 1960s are much better, and hold up well against Hollywood contemporaries like "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" and "The Great Race". I'd even say that cinematically, "The Diamond Arm" is a league above the average Hollywood movie of the era. It was shot really beautifully and has wonderful use of color.
> "The Diamond Arm" is a league above the average Hollywood movie of the era.
OK, even if true, that's only one movie :) I mean, ask any person from that era and they'll tell you it's their favorite. Kind of unfair to compare the only shining example to the "Hollywood average".
Ask Russian-speakers to recommend a fun iconic movie to watch, and Ivan Vasilievich comes up all the time. I don’t see why, but it does.
Diamond Hand too.
It would be ridiculous if the same were true about Hollywood.
A Russian asks an American what movies to watch, and 8 out of 10 people go back to 1969 to recommend the same one? Impossible.
You’d get everything from Citizen Kane to Hitchcock to Rocky, etc. But you’d also get about 150 great picks from the 80s and 90s, and another dozen from after 2000.
And forget the greats. You’d get Zoolander, Demolition Man, Total Recall, Gremlins, Scream, John Wick, Legally Blonde even… there’s such a wide pool of fun iconic popcorn movies for any person.
Not to mention your Star Wars/Trek/Gate.
These movies aren’t “good” in the sense of being art. They’re good in the sense of people wanting to watch them.
Every n years I rewatch Commando, Con-Air, The Last Starfighter, etc just for kicks. It’s not pure nostalgia- they’re fun movies.
With int’l movies from any given country the list of recommendations is extremely shallow. It’s always one or two iconic revelations from a given decade. Or a couple auteur directors who won all the awards for their think-pieces about the human condition.
The quality of recommendations depends on the social circle, I guess. When the Russian Guild of Film Critics picked the 100 best movies from 1908 to 2000, "Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession" didn't make it to the list, but the other movies I mentioned did: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls006516589/
That list includes everything from the Wes Anderson-esque "Beware of the Car" to the gritty Western-in-the-East "White Sun of the Desert", to "Come and See", a truly disturbing war drama. Lots to choose from, and many notable omissions still remain, like the wonderful 1977 comedy "Mimino" about a rural helicopter pilot who dreams of flying large airliners, and the "Peculiarities of the National Hunt" from 1995 depicting a Finn with overly romanticized expectations coming to Russia to learn about the traditional hunting customs.
Look, this is a losing argument. It’s ok if you prefer stuff like Zemeckis (who I might add, made a lot of melodramatic films himself) over international films, but that doesn’t them objectively better or more watchable for everybody.
> Look at all those top non-American films on that list:
That’s not a list of non-American films, it’s a list of non-American directors.
To answer what I assume is your every so snarkily delivered point: Yes, about a third of the directors on that list ended up successful in Hollywood. Does that mean international films are bad? Probably not! Does it maybe mean even Hollywood recognizes that there is a lot of international talent, and very good international films being made? Probably yes?
Not trolling. Having lived in many countries and had the TV on, this happens to be my unpopular opinion.
American movies are popular globally not because they're American but because they're so damn watchable/enjoyable/varied.
Granted that becomes less true every year, since Hollywood appears to be broken. Other countries haven't figured out how to pick up the slack though. 1994 Hollywood will likely never come again.
Ah yes, the 'slop, melodramatic vaudeville, or tear-jerking gut-punches' of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Wong Ching-Po, Stephen Chow, John Woo, Emin Alper, Win Wenders, Pedro Almodóvar, Sylvain Chomet, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Jacques Demy, Lee Chang-dong, Shunji Iwai, Wai Keung Lau, Wong Kar-wai, Hirokazu Koreeda, Park Chan-wook, Tran Anh Hung, Nadine Labaki, Santiago Mitre, ...
Yes, the US is a wealthy country, with a big population, a healthy movie industries and a lot of consumer. It does mean that the US produce a lot of movies, from auteur movie to holywood blockbuster. Disproportionally more than any other country in the world. But dismissing every non-US movie industry just show your ignorance about cinema in general.
There were several from China to be exact (Hong Kong to be precise, which had its own cinema golden-era between the late 80'and early 00'), and more than one from France also, some of which are more contemporary :) .
Most movie everywhere are not masterpiece, incredible contribution to the art, tasteful and original. They are easy, made to profit, amateurish, etc. That is true for every art form.
Again, yes the US being the wealthiest country in the world means that they can afford to produce more, and therefore, in your own word "can afford to swing at more pitches and consequently get more hits.". That much is true.
The rest of your message is just dismissive of non-US movie in general, and again just show your ignorance and unwillingness to engage with different movie.
> And don't get me started on "let's yell at each other for 120 minutes" Russian cinema.
Just because you don't like it does not make it slop.
> American movies are by far the most watchable, especially when you don't feel like going on a heart-wrenching journey of despair, which is all international cinema excels at.
If you were to look at US movies that win awards, they tend to be "heart-wrenching journey of despair". That is just a bias of the perception of "awardable" cinema. Good light-heated comedy rarely wins award (altough stories of hope also often do). That is not specific to "international" cinema.
You want some fun slapstick comedy from hong-kong, watch Stephen Chow movies. Some light hearted romance from France ? Jacques Demy might tickle your fancy. A more action horiented movie, Wong Ching-po wight interest you.
Just because you don't know them doesn't mean they don't exist.
Melodramatic poorly acted, over-choreographed, stunt wire work. Might as well be a dance or a cartoon. At least in the Matrix homage to this genre, there was some diegetic explanation for why the characters appeared to be throwing each other around on wires.
> A 1964 film where every line is sung? You got me there. Chalk one up for the appeal of international cinema over Hollywood.
This snarky remark ridicules you more than it does the film. "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" is widely considered one of the finest romantic movies ever made. Its use of color and lead performances are legendary. I'll let Patton Oswalt explain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nuprpehbaok
predictably, summing up the entire worlds cinema as inferior to one nations cinema provokes disagreement.
you can simply say that you were wrong to make such a sweeping judgement and have no actual notion of the entire worlds cinematic output, nor speak anything besides english to properly understand anyone elses films, but yey, feel free to dig in your heels and be wronger.
Or... I might speak multiple languages and have lived in multiple countries. Enough to see not only the movies that break through into Oscar contention, but also whatever random movie is playing in cinemas for 2 weeks over the rainy season, and will never be heard of again.
There's a universe in which one nation is a cinematic powerhouse that dwarfs not just the average quantity but also the average quality of the cinematic output of any other nation.
My argument is this is the case. Less so every year, since Hollywood is broken now, but still.
> health experts say using a placebo poses ethical issues because the group receiving it will not know if they are actually protected against the illness.
There's also the ethical issue of giving a bunch of people an intervention that doesn't do anything, other than create various side-effects.
Obviously if you're tweaking strains in the annual flu vaccine there's no need to go back to the drawing board. Just tweak and inject.
But if you're testing a new vaccine technology, it would be nice to know it's more effective than salty water.
I was listening to Zuckerberg's podcast interview by Dwarkesh, and Zuckerberg is incisive, intelligent and well-reasoned about AI and Meta's place in the new world order.
And then I remembered how hard he pushed all the VR/AR stuff just a couple years ago, just as incisively, going so far as to rename Facebook to Meta.
On balance I think I have ever more respect for him because of this flub: most CEO's, especially ones whose entire adult identity is tied to their company, would not be willing to pivot this completely from a lost cause to a smarter one. And of those, only a subset would be able to accomplish it.
The name change and push were at least in part a way to change the narrative away from Facebook’s lack of data privacy, misinformation and platform harm.
Facebook was to Phillip-Moris as Meta is to Altria Group.
Part was a strategic realignment toward something zuck perceived as bigger, sure. And this kind of spend goes beyond what would have been needed to accomplish a rebrand.
If this had been the policy, we’d still be technologically in the 18th century.
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