John Kenneth Galbraith says in his book The Great Crash 1929 that most knew it was heading for a fall, but everyone assumed they could get out before losing their money. Turns out the order system was over-whelmed so they couldn't get out.
Maybe in these times it will be a flash crash that catches everyone off guard. A flash crash that doesn't rebound like the one in 2010
I particpated in the personal computer boom of the 1980's and remember mainframe guys who were the establishment saying the same thing about personal computers.
AI is starting in a much easier business environment, where so much data is online and things can be done by APIs which would’ve required moving paper around in the 80s, but it seems like we’re still missing the clear wins PCs had almost immediately in the 80s. Tons of small businesses were eying spreadsheets or accounting apps, engineers not working in the PC space and scientists saw immediate productivity wins, authors and journalists were all over word processors, etc.
There are some wins from AI now but it’s kind of telling how companies like Microsoft have to trick customers into paying for it with changes to their plans because there just aren’t enough people seeing real value to the point where they’re jumping to pay more for it.
Citibank and Merck exectives are the establishment. MS, Google are the providers. Microsoft became a trillion dollar company by selling software for personal computers, which establishment types at the time were skeptical of.
It seems to me that the numbers don't lie. Either the tool is producing value (additional revenue, fewer costs) in excess of its cost, or it isn't. I don't think you need to be adept at technology to make that evaluation.
Numbers don't lie if your instrumentation is measuring the contributions of new technology accurately. The productivity gains of middle managers using personal computers, often at home bought out of personal funds, didn't show up at first either. Managers bought home computers to do spreadsheets to make their jobs easier. Those productivity gains were eventually measured.
This is a reductionist perspective that is unhelpful. Does buying a water cooler in the office increase profit margins? What about a coffee machine? Across a wide portfolio of decisions, a business does need to be profitable. However measuring the individual impact of single vendors is often a very difficult task.
How do you measure developer productivity? Code quality? Developer happiness? As far as I know, no one in the industry can put concrete numbers to these things. This makes it basically impossible to answer the question you pose.
The survey was about operational costs and revenue. Water cooler and coffee machine manufacturers don't market their products to be "smarter than people in many ways" and "able to significantly amplify the output of people using them"[1]. If these claims are true, then surely relying on this technology should bring both lower operational costs, since human labor is expensive, and an increase in revenue, since the superhuman intelligence and significantly amplified output of humans using these tools should produce higher quality products and benefits across the board.
There are of course many factors at play here, and a substantial percentage of CEOs report a positive RoI, but the fact that a majority don't shouldn't be dismissed on the basis of this being difficult to measure.
I absolutely reject your premise here. I feel like Bush Jr. is very responsible for the state of the world we're in right now. You can track back a whole lot of policies and erosion of democratic norms in our system directly to his administrations.
Or the fact we are woefully unprepared for a peer conflict. We wasted how many trillions in the middle east? We cancelled how many modernization programs to fund counter insurgency programs instead?
I think "neurotypical" and "neurodivergent" suffice. I've been diagnosed and am under treatment for bipolar type II but it doesn't fit exactly. I feel I am somewhere between (or a mixture) of autism and bipolar. My psychiatrist says it doesn't matter at my age (68) what we call it.
I like the term neurodivergent because it's not stigmatized. I like the way I think and wouldn't change it. I have special abilities that make me a good computer programmer. I can tell people I am neurodivergent and not feel any embarassment or feel any stigma that comes from telling people I am bipolar.
OT. Anyone know if there is academic literature studying the life cycle of words that eventually become slurs? Like "neurodivergent" was at one point obscure. Then it starts to become more common place. Then riffs on the word start to be used in an unflattering way. Then it becomes a slur that can't be repeated in polite company. I figure the internet accelerates these trends, but how many years has it taken historically?
When I was a kid people often used the words "mulatto" and "midget" in a socially acceptable way. Now we say "mixed race" and "little people." I don't see these becoming stigmatized because they are technically true and difficult to construe as a slur. I see neurodivergent this way.
My daughter was about the age of King's daughter when I first read this letter. It had a deep and profound effect and strengthened my commitment to racial and gender equality:
when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"
> "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"
Son, we are all human beings. There's only one way to make sense of it. It's economic slavery. Some people get rich making other people work for nothing... or for very little pay and food. If the rich people keep the poor people struggling in poverty, the poor people may never find the strength to free themselves. They'll be slaves for generations.
I had Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3 do a Tarot reading for me given what their memory systems know about me and was underwhelmed but I that just may be Tarot, which I'm not familiar with.
More interesting was when I asked them to tell me which character I most resemble in the folowing: The Wire, The Sopranos, Better Call Saul/Breaking Bad and the game of Chess.
Both said I was Freeman in The Wire, Hesch in The Sopranos, Mike in Breaking Bad and a Knight in chess. I asked them to explain their reasoning, which was enlightening from a self-knowledge perspective.
That 'underwhelmed' feeling is exactly what I was trying to avoid!
It makes sense that the character matching worked well—AI is incredible at pattern matching your past data/context. But Divination (Tarot/I Ching) requires Synchronicity and a sense of 'randomness' that feels earned.
When an LLM generates a reading, it's just predicting the next likely token, which flattens the magic. The manual ritual (shuffling cards or clicking stalks) restores that 'weight' that AI removes.
They would likely pick the cards according to what your text looks like at the moment. You should at least ask them to use a random function. And even then they might keep picking according to the mood/content of the text.
Your statement would be accurate if Claude and Gemini had no memory system and each chat were fresh. I've been talking to Claude for two years so it knows quite a bit about me. Gemini less since they were late to add memory. Since your handle is "manfromchina1" perhaps Chinese AI don't have memory systems?
This post disappeared off the front page in record time. I now can't find it on the first 4 pages. I think my point about censorship has been proven correct.
I agree for the most part but I've been getting bored with HN, mostly because anything controversial is censored by the mods and by ideological fans of certain people, especially Elon Musk whose fans will flag and downvote anything negative about him. This thread is a good example:
I’ve been an HN participant for ~14 years, the vibe ebbs and flows. You can hide and ignore the folks you mention, what’s important imho is that the mods continue to aggressively cultivate a specific community vibe. Nothings perfect, but this is as close as it’s going to get to perfect imho as it relates to intellectual curiosity and understanding how the systems we exist in work.
The addon uBlock Origin has an option for rules to change HTML and could be used for this [1]. Replace Username with the persons Username. add to My Filters. I encourage people that dislike or often find themselves disagreeing with or being activated triggered by me to do this for my username.
There's are some interesting AI issues with Grok. How do you edit an AI so it says the opposite of the training data because you want it to agree with your ideology? Can a AI image generator which was trained on tons of porn, which Grok was since it was trained on X, ever really be considered safe? Is Grokipedia a fair replacement for Wikipedia which it was derived from?
But alas, we can't discuss any of this without being flagged by Musk fans. Someone commented on the thread I posted that the mods could unflag if they wanted to.
As far as I can tell, censored by mods is quite rare. It's almost always for violating the site guidelines (repeatedly and/or extremely flagrantly), rather than based on the ideology of the content. Most of the "censorship" is downvoting and/or flagging from users, not from mods.
But you can post almost anything here. You want to post Marxist stuff? You can, but you need to be more than just a propagandist. Actually thoughtfully interact with opposing ideas; admit when the data is against you.
You want to support capitalism? You can do that too, but again, be more than a shill (though being a shill for capitalism is more accepted here).
You want to criticize the US? Many of us do, from time to time. But again, don't just be a propagandist or ideologue. "USA is only evil! Down with USA!" gets censored. "The United States is acting like a bully in international relations, and has a long history of doing so" is (mostly) accepted as a reasonable and accurate statement.
You want to support Hitler, Stalin, or Mao? Yeah, that's a tougher sell here. You're probably going to get downvoted to oblivion for it.
>You want to support Hitler, Stalin, or Mao? Yeah, that's a tougher sell here. You're probably going to get downvoted to oblivion for it.
This is not true, which is the worst moderation decision about the site. This site would be greatly improved, if this actually was how it worked.
If you post any actually extremely anti-consensus opinion here you get one or two down votes, your post gets flagged and everyone ignores it. This is obviously an anti-trolling measure, but obviously people will just abusively flag anything they really do not like.
I browse from hckrnews.com and read comments with showdead enabled, so I see both flagged/dead submissions and flagged/dead comments. Flagging isn't abused in a measurable way at either level.
"pulsed radio waves" makes me think of lethal microwaves but only for a fraction of every second so they are not lethal but still damaging. If for a thousandth of every second you spiked a massive microwave burst into someone's brain I imagine it wouldn't be good for them.
I generally don't support doxxing people, but with a group of federal agents wearing masks to prevent identification are breaking all norms of law enforcement to commit crimes against Americans, doxxing them may be the only remedy.
It's not Hacker News. It's Musk fans on HN. The article is flagged (anyone can do it) but not dead. My reasonable comment elsewhere in this thread was also flagged by Musk fans but it's still alive.
The mods absolutely endorse it though so in that sense it very much is them. They tend to be extremely dishonest and evasive when confronted directly about it but I mean anyone who has an account here can see with their own lying eyes that this happens multiple times a day, every day and it’s simply not plausible that it’s anything else other than something they support.
The gap between the rules as they are officially written down and the rules as they exist in practice is so wide that it’s basically unrecognisable when you start putting them side by side.
The mods will just gaslight you as well about the entire thing. I know for some unknown reason it’s considered bad form to have anything other than a high opinion of the job they do but I think they do a bad job. I’m not saying it’s not a hard job or anything, I just think they are actively bad at it.
The purpose of a system is what it does. If the system did something different from its purpose, they would change it. I'm sure it's also intentional there's no vouch button for posts. This will change once every high quality post is flagged to death.
I suspect dead usually means shadow ban, at least for comments, and vouch is a way to selectively show through community support a high value comment from an otherwise abusive user. Where flagged is overt, already applies just to that one comment, and vouching in that case wouldn't really make logical sense. Unless we want people to be able to wage flag wars.
I am no Musk fan but this "outrage" is entirely dishonest and stupid. If you have a problem with the images Grok generates, then don't use it. This is bottom of the barrel journalism and it is no wonder the story is flagged.
Why should I answer, you made up your judgement from my initial comment and there was no substance in the reply. My mistake was to reply in the first place. For the record, I understood the colloquialism even if English isn't my native tongue.
Maybe in these times it will be a flash crash that catches everyone off guard. A flash crash that doesn't rebound like the one in 2010
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash
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