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If OpenAI's super-intelligence can solve Navier-Stokes why can't they fix this stupid bug that ate up 330GB of my Mac's disk space?
Because the former can be marketed very prestigiously, the latter hardly can.
According to https://www.briefia.fr/en/article/openai-revendique-la-resol... it is estimated that solving Navier-Stokes did cost OpenAI 40 million USD. I would bet that if OpenAI spent the same amount of money using its super-intelligence to fix this bug, this would work.
> Whereas pretty much everything hacking-related is already a felony thanks to DMCA and other similar laws, so they don't have much to lose.
Hackers were much more rebellious in former days before such laws were past. My opinion the reason why hackers got more "civilized" is that you could earn quite a lot of money by getting (and staying in) a job in big tech.
Hacking was mostly about gaining access before AOL and there was absolutely a "let's give this kid a summer job" attitude floating around after War Games came out.
The chain of resource acquisition and information gathering necessary to arrive at a point where you need to make a long-distance phone call you could never afford was impressive in itself. Calling card fraud by a bright minor for educational purposes against a corporate entity absolutely loathed by every adult at the time just wasn't that big of a deal.
From my perspective the point of being a hacker is individual but follows observable desire paths. A lot of those have been filled in now.
Probably the biggest reason "hackers" got civilized is just a regression to the mean effect. When you have something extremely difficult to get into, there is going to be some strong selection effect that is going to accidentally select for some other correlated traits. As the barriers to entry dropped, more people get in, so the selection gate drops as well and you get something closer to the average human. You can see this in all sorts of niches over time. For instance, while little music niches will often blame their unique culture getting diluted on "selling out" I think it is often the case just that they attracted more people and got regressed to the mean.
Maybe I'm biased by my young age and lack of knowledge but aren't modern day hackers way more anti-social-norms (piracy, crypto, doxxing) and against "the man" (directly antagonizing big tech, E2EE proselytizing, fighting against electronic surveillance, circumventing online ID requirements) than they were back in the 70s-80s? I always imagined pre-internet hackers to be spending their nights messing around with university computers, not undermining business models of leading IT companies, but maybe I'm wrong.
> finding yourself in an echo chamber (by choice or not) online means that you may find yourself less comfortable talking with people you don't agree with, things like that. I grew up in a small town pre-social media, and that meant I didn't have much of a choice about who I was surrounded by. If I was growing up today, what would stop me from retreating to a comfy social media-mediated environment without any challenge or friction? [...] That world sounds terrifying to me.
One advantage of the new situation is that you collect less hate for people whose opinion you disagree with because you can mostly ignore them instead of having to get along with them - and with each interaction collecting another dose of hate for them and their opinion.
> My friend, who is a math professor, told me that they weep because they are about to become just like us developers: prompt writers and AI output reviewers.
If it was about understanding interesting proofs that some AI came up with, and extracting their essence, I don't think the situation would be so bad.
I see the much larger problem in the now existing career prospects of non-tenured researchers in mathematics. Everybody know how precarious the career prospects in academia and how precarious often the non-tenured positions in academia already are. With the new AI breakthroughs in math, these have in my opinion even worsened a lot.
> I also think ordering everything online is inherently immoral (provided you are an able bodied person living in a city)
Most things that I buy on Amazon (and other online shops) are simply not easy to get in the city where I live (and it's not a small city). I very recently wrote about this topic in a HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50063708
Additionally, keep in mind that getting into the city center means a bicycle ride of nearly 25 minutes (using a tram (or hypothetically a car) wouldn't be much faster) per direction. So, any shopping that I do in the city will automatically have an overhead of at least 50 minutes just for getting there and back again. To this, you have to add the time that you need to find the respective item in the shop (for bigger shops, this can take some time even if it sells what you need).
This is still often worth it if you are very certain that you will get what you want. But if you are not certain about this, you typically wasted at least 90 minutes. I admit that for some kinds of items/shop, this risk is mitigated because some shops (e.g. the next hardware store) let you check online which items are available in the store.
Then, in Germany there are so opening times of shops. Since the city where I live is rather large, most shops are open at least until 8 pm. In smaller cities, shops often close much earlier (say 6 pm). At least if you are living in a smaller city, shopping often thus requires careful coördination with work time.
I (used to) live in big cities in Germany and for me the next big grocery store or street with a lot of small shops for basically everything I need day to day was about 10-15 minutes walking distance.
As a laptop worker I usually enjoy being able to move my body a bit.
Similar for the 20 minute bike ride for a more specialised shop.
And of course sometimes I would order online if I can’t find it in a normal store. But never from Amazon ;)
Going after the examples you mentioned in your other post:
- books of any kind i can order in a nearby book store, about 10 minutes from my home; sure it sometimes takes a week or so but it’s a real book store with actual people working there who love books. Haven’t yet found a book they couldn’t get, but my reading also isnt very obscure.
- maker supplies i cant really say, but I probably would also have to order them online, no idea
- games i buy online, I can’t remember when I last got a physical copy of a game; but then again I play the same 5 games for the last 2 decades
maybe people like you should step up and build something? Easy to "bezos this bezos that" but the man changed the world with Amazon, and created insane amount of wealth due to providing even more insane amount of benefit to the world.
How am I supposed to get japanese sharpening stone? Local shops carry garbage products. And first online non Amazon search is a site where all 3 of my clicks on various items in the page resulted in error 500 : https://www.knivesandtools.de/de/pt/-shapton-glass-stone-hr-...
Smart people typically turn out to be disrespectful towards stupid people if in their life such stupid people made their life more difficult. And smart people often have a good memory.
If they never had any problems with stupid people in life, smart people are in most cases much more respecting.
> Since you're so certain of this impact "AI" will have, what "skills" do you "predict" are required on the human end of this?
Not Flere-Imsaho:
I think if one made a serious effort, one could easily find a well-founded answer to this question that is based on a solid rational foundation.
The problem rather is: people (often in decision positions, but also employees who fear for their jobs) don't act rationally on AI:
- For example, managers firing good programmers because programmers are to be replaced by AI. By now you can find many reports of companies who try to convince their programmers that they fired "because of AI" to come back.
- Similarly, panicking employees who demand irrational restrictions on AI. EDIT: with this I mean for example "legal restrictions on AI with on a pretense of say 'AI is too dangerous for the public'".
These very non-rational factors and irrational actions are very hard to predict.
> Similarly, panicking employees who demand irrational restrictions on AI.
What is so irrational about avoiding AI altogether? If the dev gets the same or higher quality work done in the same amount of time without it (oh, yes they can/do) what is the risk?
What kind of sweatshop has such a bottleneck with dev time that they require AI? If the dev is micromanaged to the extent that they are told which tools to use, that's something else already.
Let's meet in the middle and say most devs, regardless of the extremity of their stance on AI, probably at least read Google AI summaries and copy-paste that code from time to time. I've never heard of anyone complaining about that. Brother, let me tell you that's 99% of the productivity boost we're gonna see until this upcoming AI winter is over again. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional.
> Amazon is basically destroying the shopping high streets.
A lot of people that I know would strongly prefer to go to some brick and mortar shop. The problem is: most of items that I buy on the internet (e.g. on Amazon) are simply not easily available in a shop in my town (and I am not living in a small town).
For example:
- lots of obscure scientific books that are written in German or even English (I live in Germany)
- similarly: lots of rather niche belletristic books (think into the direction: some obscure novel recommendation on HN) often in various foreign languages
N.B. It is true that an important reason why Amazon got big among early computer enthusiasts in Germany in the 90s is that it was one of the few ways for easily getting computer science textbooks delivered from the USA - though with long delivery times.
- 3D printing supplies (why doesn't there exist a brick an mortar store for this?)
- very niche indie games (they are by now basically all sold on Steam, GOG, Epic Store or itch.io)
- very specific parts for Maker projects
- ...
So, the situation is not that people necessarily want to buy on the internet or specifically Amazon, but rather that there exists barely any way to get what they want in a brick and mortar store in even large cities.
>The problem is: most of items that I buy on the internet (e.g. on Amazon) are simply not easily available in a shop in my town (and I am not living in a small town).
Because it is not cheap or available if its not made in China.
> If they actually had access to systems that could do "years of top professional work" across software, cyber, science, and math, they would not mostly be leaving to start more chatbot companies, agent frameworks, eval tools, and "AI for workflow" startups.
> They would be starting normal companies to disrupt the global economies of the world.
Many people who work in such industries already know an insane amount of inefficiencies. Unluckily, they are not in positions and have no political power (with respect to organizational policy) in the company that they are capable of changing the situation.
Additionally, many of these sectors are heavily regulated, so it is very hard to make a difference in this sector as a startup founder, and even if there is an entrpreneur who founds a company to change the status quo, an insane amount of work in the company will be handling the big amount of red tape.
Because the former can be marketed very prestigiously, the latter hardly can.
According to https://www.briefia.fr/en/article/openai-revendique-la-resol... it is estimated that solving Navier-Stokes did cost OpenAI 40 million USD. I would bet that if OpenAI spent the same amount of money using its super-intelligence to fix this bug, this would work.
But seems not to be very economical. :-)
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