Honestly, I’m a bit scared but also a bit excited.
I’m currently reading Africa by John Reader which covers a lot of humanity storyline. From HN I get the humanity achievements that are happening right now.
The feeling digesting both daily is in order of magnitudes bigger than what any really exciting tv show did to me.
I honestly at this point don’t know anything about what could be possible and what couldnt.
I understand that this is really freightening, but also especially ETH being false gives even more hope that some fundamental problems could be solved in our lifetime, for example understanding universe, aging, colonization of planets and also our limits. I know I’m the minority, but these answers really interest me.
Nobody is solving colonization of planets in this lifetime unless we find a way to accelerate mass faster than the speed of light (and decelerate it at the other end) or extend the lifespan/radiation resistance or can preserve bodies in suspended animation for long periods. Even then, that just removed one of the many technical hurdles. We don't know which planets to target- are you going to send people to solar systems when you don't know if they are habitable? Modify people to be able to inhabit otherwise hostile worlds? How do you deal with boredom on a 1,000+ year trip?
Even with aging, our efforts are better spent increasing quality of life across humanity than helping a few rich people live to 150.
> Nobody is solving colonization of planets in this lifetime
Eh, speak for yourself.
I'm not sure how anyone can say "nobody is doing x.." or "we'll never be able to do y.." after the advances of the last few years. Not sure you understand the implications of what we're seeing here and what RSI/ASI will bring about.
Even just imagining the technological acceleration we'll experience when open source models at the Opus level can be run without insane hardware (I guess in a year or so) or if we just stopped development of AI today - is still insane.
If there's a will, there's a way. There are engineering solutions to every problem you mentioned.
"Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
I've worked in ML since 1994. I've been very impressed with the progress of models lately. I read "The Coming Technological Singularity" when it was first written and dedicated my career to seeing these sorts of things coming true.
That doesn't mean that their exponential improvement will change faster than light travel. Therefore, to deliver a human being to the surface of another planet (let's say Proxima Centauri at ~4 ly away) with enough resources to create a stable colony means we'll travel at less than the speed of light. Even with a solar assist, the best we can do right now is less than 1% the speed of light in an unmanned probe. People are working on alternatives, but those are not the sort of technology you just pop in a space ship and send for 400 years to a neighboring star. How do you support a population for 400 years?
As an alternative, let's just make humans like tardigrades, capable of shrivelling up and surviving high-radiation, low-moisture environments. Then we can take 10K years to get to a remote location. As a bonus, the resulting humans can survive in a much wider range of conditions so we have many more target systems to consider. Oh, but that's human engineering- are you sure that we'll just be able to genetically modify people (technologically and morally) at that level any time soon? A single person died in an early gene therapy trial and it shut down the field for 10+ years.
Basically, what you're arguing is that exponential growth in AI (not a given) will unlock huge material sciences and biological advances. While possible, it's unlikely to combine in a way that suggests "we should send people to other solar systems".
What my phone will be able to remember what I use it for at different times and places with better than 50% accuracy? The real tech miracle today is mRNA and solar panels. Not sure why you think being able to generate theory will help u leash the material goods needed to put people on Mars. Even if we get the singularity, would it regard human exploration as worth while compared to to machine exploration?
How about sending robots to a habitable planet with biological material of humans, programmed to tell us the story of earth?
Re life quality: Sure technical advancement can lead to cheaper electricity, better materials discovered, disease prevention and a lot of other stuff. A lot is hold back by complexity.
I don’t want to make a call that this will happen and that it’s a net-positive for society. I’m just saying the technical advancements is interesting and enablin.
biological material of humans? you'll have to expand your argument here. Are you reconstituting the material on the other end? If you have that technology, do you need a robot to tell a human the story of earth? Why not just upload it directly?
Like we haven’t solved it but it we partly did finish birth in an artificial womb and we have birthed extinct species through a different breed.
Theoretically it might be possible to do embryo arks where you would send machines to a new habitable planet and they would travel for hundreds of of thousand of years then build everything up and then artificially bring humans back to life.
Whilst this obviously has an enormous amount of challenges, we don’t know a physical law that is not allowing that.
Imagine what we do now and what we do in 100.000+ years when we face extinction.
We might also just blow us up, even though I think extinction is very unlikely
> gives even more hope that some fundamental problems could be solved in our lifetime, for example understanding universe, aging, colonization of planets and also our limits.
There are infinitely many more ways to kill and torture a human than to save one.
Yeah I think depends on the fidelity of the world model.
If you count “impales person with blue stick while distant asteroid is in position X Y Z” then yes, there are probably infinite, so it depends how you class a discrete method
As most others I’m also very doubtful of making this a worthwhile venture. I hope OP didn’t pay too much and makes this a chill project.
I see 2 additional paths:
1) I have no knowledge, but how does the let the crawlers pay work? Could a site like css-tricks with a lot of backlinks make money on that ? Or do LLMs have enough free content available
yaya but i wanna check now. i'm curious if kimi and deepseek ever got anything actually going or just bullshitted me for 10 hours straight, and it won't feel as cathartic to see that they had actually succeeded if i check tomorrow.
i'm poor, i can't donate :(
(i also shouldn't have used $140~ in API credits, but that's a whole different issue (don't bully me for my... bad spending habits ( • ᴖ • ｡)))
I try to manually manage as much of the context as possible. Most of the time, I limit myself to a context window of 200k, and it works great for my use cases.
NGL Jetbrains has massively helped my developer journey and be a great tool for many many years. I don’t open it that often anymore, but I see that they’re trying hard to stay relevant, which is probably not easy as probably the whole market moved against you.
Very interesting. If I’m honest with myself it could be very much a reality that I would be better off in only using for medium effor size tasked instead of trying to "offload" the necessary architecture thinking to "high" or even more.
They are good for inspiration though, but maybe I rather let me build a demo and then tell a medium model what I want from it.
I mean if you read some history it’s not the first time complete workforces have been replaced. It doesn’t mean the same jobs stay, but usually there will be something to do.
Whilst I agree it’s not conclusive to assume that just bc something happened the way it did in the past it will happen again. I think there’s still 'reason to believe'.
My answer to your job is that more jobs move from secondary to tertiary sector (entertainment). That has happened usually.
I’m currently reading Africa by John Reader which covers a lot of humanity storyline. From HN I get the humanity achievements that are happening right now.
The feeling digesting both daily is in order of magnitudes bigger than what any really exciting tv show did to me.
I honestly at this point don’t know anything about what could be possible and what couldnt.
I understand that this is really freightening, but also especially ETH being false gives even more hope that some fundamental problems could be solved in our lifetime, for example understanding universe, aging, colonization of planets and also our limits. I know I’m the minority, but these answers really interest me.
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