I don’t think your judgment matters especially regarding bias because you’re selling content, you feed off of AI hype, you create nothing substantial (content-wise) but just trying to funnel traffic to your website. Sorry but you’re not at a place to talk about objectivity especially when it comes to AI related stuff.
I don’t know what principles this kind of thinking falls under, but one useful approach is to know clearly what you’re trying to do, achieve, or understand. Know your assumptions and be honest about them, acknowledge that they can fail and challenge them when they carry critical weight in your reasoning, and keep peeling back those assumptions until you reach a point where their correctness rests on obviously reasonable facts or axioms that you no longer need to unpack.
Also, in my limited personal experience so far, the people who relentlessly talk about and evangelize first principles thinking (mostly highly self-confident tech bros and big-tech veterans) are often the ones who fail most absurdly at actually doing it.
It reminds me of the exchange attributed to Robert Surcouf: when an English officer supposedly told him, “You French fight for money, while we English fight for honour,” Surcouf replied, “Each man fights for what he lacks.”
P.S I don’t have any stance on the French-English conflict in the anecdote above.
It’s sad to see how these insights and “drops of wisdom” have changed to the point where nothing substantial seems to come from people who are in a position to influence, at least to some extent, the software landscape and where the industry is heading in terms of practices and approaches. Instead, we get shallow, very basic principles, still valuable, but often little more than mid-level-engineer realizations being spat out.
The worst part is that the product, the actual output, often feels underwhelming and at odds with the narrative around it. Action matters more than the narrative. Show these principles in your work and in how you engage with the community, rather than through shallow thought-leadership mumbo jumbo.
Another thing I find skin-crawling is bragging disguised as humility and sincerity. Come on!! Expecting people to buy into that performance is, in itself, a kind of insult to their intelligence.
yep, my first thought is that if THIS is what qualifies as a thought worth writing down from someone in a very prestigious position, we are well and truly fucked.
Mine was that if I (or anyone else not-hn-famous) had written this and posted it to hackernews 10 times, it wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the front page.
Yeah sure, learning the internals of a technology that’s being actively developed will probably teach you things that remain useful for awhile even if your learning outcomes could end up being different than what he’s implying.
Whether that makes a good long-term investment is quite debatable.
IMO, LeCun’s take (at the end) is far more forward-looking since it aims to gain more insight into what could come next based on what we know about the current state of the art.
All that being said, the extent to which these people capitalize on our tendency to be blinded by the halo effect is incredible. A constant stream of bite-sized aphorisms…
This is especially at a different level for early startup figures who happened to be in the right place at the right time and usually did little more than digitizing mundane, traditional day-to-day processes. Yet they’re treated as geniuses and prophets, with people hanging on their every word as though everything they say contains some deeper wisdom. PG and the like often strike me as broken clocks and they’re still profiting from having been very early players in the game, who had good instincts for commercialization and capitalism.
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LeCun’s reply:
> I would try to figure out why LLMs can write my essays but not clean my bedroom.
Then I would study topics in college and grad school that could help solve that problem.
I'll figure out a set of methods and architectures beyond LLMs that can quickly learn to perform physical tasks as efficiently as humans and animals.
That last item is also what I would if I were 30, 40, 50, or 66 years old
“Talk is cheap, show me the prompt” is my go to request for dealing with people’s AI generated responses. Voice and tone varies, of course, depending on the recipient.
It feels like prompt(s) is where the actual thinking can be observed these days.
> Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything?
This is what I think too. But, users’ psychology might be playing a role here. Anthropic has great advantage from being the first major player delivering functional agentic coding solution (rather than an intelligent autocomplete) and they were able to impress people by Opus’ iterative improvements early this year.
It’s technically very easy to switch between models, harnesses but their moat or perhaps a main source of users’ friction could be FOMO. That’s especially powerful in this competitive environment where everyone keeps wondering/worrying about what others might be doing to get or stay ahead.
i recently had to stop using logi options, whatever the heck it’s called, because the app doesn’t start on my mac (sequoia). no error, no logs, nothing helpful can be found online.
i gave up and started using bettermouse, which i have mixed feelings about. it does the job but the set of controls feels too complicated/overwhelming. i couldn’t find that sweet spot for my pointer speed/precision yet.
I had this exact experience! Bettermouse has been fine, but the mouse speed seems to be vary wildly across different applications for some reason.
I am glad to get off of logi options though. Even before it finally stopped working altogether, it would frequently just stop working and my mouse settings would revert to default behavior.
Yes! I had exactly the same experience. Quitting habits like smoking, drinking coffee, or playing video games has always been much easier during those periods, and it felt like it happened on its own. It was mind-blowing to notice that after it happened a couple of times.
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