The author’s claim that Claude is a multiplier for skill is probably true for now but it also feels like cope inspired by usability issues with Claude. The advice is all good, but none of it is especially clever or impressive or hard to grasp. The multiplier just comes from the fact that anthropic hadn’t taken this essay and several similar ones and incorporated their feedback into the product. This is a pretty shallow most of expertise that anthropic ought to automate in a week.
My complaint with anthropic is actually the opposite. They seem too focused on building this suite of products (because they want lock-in), but they can’t even get the availability and speed on their models in an acceptable state. It really does seem like they’re falling behind google and OpenAI at the moment.
Just piling in to this because it needs to be stated with emphasis. Wikipedia foundation is not Wikipedia. Their donation campaigns are highly deceptive. Pennies on the dollar will go to supporting and maintaining the actual encyclopedia. WMF is as much a liability to the encyclopedia as a beneficiary.
I have different reasoning than the parent commenter. Why do you want to help fund Wikipedia? It is in no danger at all. Funding it even more lavishly probably won't help it achieve its goals more effectively; it's dependent (by design, and for good reason) on volunteer effort, which is the real bottleneck.
I feel like my Wikipedia-boosting bona fides are pretty solid on HN. I think it's not just a very valuable resource but also one of the great intellectual achievements of the last 100 years. My point isn't that the project is unworthy; it's that they don't need your money.
If you want to help Wikipedia, the best thing you can do is contribute to articles. Time and expertise is always going to be a more valuable donation than anything monentary.
IDK man - this is sort of true, but I think you under-estimate how quality and price scale. A Jumbo-Choco-Monaka at 7/11 is still a fantastic value at ¥160 even if you adjust for purchasing power. GDP Per Capita (PPP) is about $85K in the US and about $60K in Japan, but even granting a 2x increase for California then a $2 choco-monaka would be a steal. As it is, I just spent $4.50 for an Its-It about an hour ago and while I am quite a dedicated fan of these things I would have gladly forked over ¥700 for a Chocomonaka if such things existed in California. I realize that people don't live out of 7/11 for their daily groceries and your point has some validity, but the quality/cost is still a great deal relative to what you would get in America.
$85K vs $60K ...to give you some idea the typical wage in Okinawa for a combini job is about $6/hour. I think the income disparity is larger than those numbers suggest.
FWIW Japanese people living there tell me combinis are expensive based on their salaries and I believe them.
IIUC Japanese budgets are different. They spend comparatively less on housing and transportation than Americans. The Anglosphere in general has somehow developed a rather toxic status quo when it comes to that first basic need, with everything else only being slightly cheaper.
I would rather pay 15% more on goods and 30% less on rent.
> I would rather pay 15% more on goods and 30% less on rent.
Exactly. Housing and the housing market in Japan is an interesting beast. Based on my limited understanding as someone who has sort-of briefly looked at buying a home in Japan, houses are not really financial investments. For example, compare house prices in Japan (including the land) with a house in Australia.
Indeed, Japanese houses are designed to be disposable. Likely a result of them being built historically out of wood and paper and the abundance of wood.
Japanese "disposable houses" was a policy implemented after WW2, to rapidly rebuild the country as well as keeping a lot of people employed. And indeed a house has traditionally dropped faster in value after purchase than even cars.
And this policy has also meant that houses haven't been insulated, and very often haven't been strong against earthquakes, the latter is kind of baffling in this earthquake-prone country (the Noto earthquake on Jan. 1 2024 flattened large areas of houses, with nothing left standing). It's only gradually, through certain code changes implemented a couple of times post-1980 that things are improving. But it was as late as just a few years ago that the Japanese government hesitated, and in the end didn't implement certain new building standards, because that would put a LOT of makers out of work as they didn't have the competance to build to those standards. But this has finally changed, with the latest update a year ago.
I have to take issue with the ".. out of wood and paper". Because that's not the cause. There are buildings here literally a thousand years old and built of wood, still standing, after centuries of sometimes unbelievably big earthquakes. And wooden homes built properly these days handle earthquakes as good as anything else. It's not the material, it's how it's done which matters.
Source: Researched a lot of house building companies the last couple of years. Some of them, building wooden houses, have been in business for a long time and haven't had a single house as a victim of earthquakes for half a century, with the occasional exception where the earth has literally flipped over. Nothing can handle that. But "ordinary" earthquakes? All still standing. There are photos around showing certain houses alone on a field of flattened buildings. These guys.
It's not just that. Houses are a consumer good instead of an investment, yes, but a large percentage of Japanese people live in apartments that are built to last and be renovated (because they ARE investments).
The difference is partly the attitude towards houses, but it also has to do with how difficult it is for foreign investors to speculate in the market, the ubiquity of public transit (which makes accessibility as a value-driving feature mostly moot), the way the building code precludes a "missing middle" (or "missing cheap place"), and other features of modern Japanese society that are alien to Americans (and Canadians, but weirdly not always to Britons).
The point is that there are lots of ways to chip away at the affordability issue. It's just that ALL of them necessarily attack RE investors' ability to exploit their property to the fullest extent possible.
One last anecdote: South Korea is similarly situated to Japan, but is also facing an extreme affordability crisis. So, there is the suggestion that NONE of the material aspects matter if the owner class is determined to wring every cent out of you. The changes disincentivize gouging, but in the end, you just have to have property owners willing to acknowledge housing as a an affordable necessity and not a profit center built on the backs of a captive audience...
Looking at the history of the memory industry the biggest risk is that a firm would over produce and go bankrupt. Maybe this time is different but so far no memory chip maker has gone under because their competition increased capacity.
I might be wrong but your second point can't be true if the first one is true.
Let me explain, imagine CXML grows massive and builds a lot of fabs, so much so that it becomes the leader in multiple segments, then the market demand cools off.
Then CXML the company that invested massively has oversupply so it undercuts every other memory company.
Aka, Samsung, SK Hynix are dead, and to protect Micron now US has 10000% tariff on the supply of memory.
Imagine. Because that has happened, if you don't play the boom and bust game someone will because the market is very large during a boom, and generally the player scaling more isn't the one with margins to protect and generally has the ability to undercut others.
Asian memory chip giants were made by under cutting European and American companies, American companies adapted by moving manufacturing to Asia, and European ones got bought for pennies or dissolved.
The two points are not contradictory. And historically playing the boom and bust game has blown every player out of the game. This time could be different in so far as Chinese firms can run insane losses of deemed vital to national interests. This is a problem for these firms, they need to balance that with the existential remains risk that over production can drive them bankrupt.
Québécois separatism is also driven by a single party with no plan for what to do with all the other groups. I also don’t think that an independent Quebec would be a good idea, but they have leveraged the idea to get equalization payments and increased voting rights. These concessions largely come at the expense of Alberta, so it shouldn’t be hard to see why people would be frustrated without any cia operations.
Yeah, total us payroll is around 15T. They are basically spending $10 per employee per year. Or 1/10000 of the total spending on wages.
This is actually small in terms of political spending. There are random scam ballot measures in CA that get more spending per voter than this.
*edit: the actual report details this is just for services related to efforts targeting their own work force via lawyers and consultants. The total spending on the issue is likely much higher:
https://www.epi.org/publication/u-s-employers-spend-more-tha...
This is their third publicity stunt in the past couple of months. It follows the exact same pattern of attention seeking at the expense of the commons.
At this point they seem like a bunch of low empathy jerks. They are gleefully describing their progress in developing yet new frontiers in AI slop. I’m sure they are all very pleased to think that they will be profiting from a future where ai slop is everywhere. I could go on but it’s tedious.
Yes, our experiments get attention, but I wouldn't call them publicity stunts. The point is to give the world more data points of what happens when you put AI out in the world and let democracy do its thing. Soon, a lot more people will do this at large scale because it will be easy. I hope we decide where we want AI in society before that.
Personally, I'm very much pro a pause on large AI training for example. I hope our data could be useful as a grounding in such discussions.
Assuming that this is a good faith response and not merely a bot (and I have very little reason to believe this given your history of spewing AI slop):
I think this is a lot of bullshit. You're either lying to me or you're lying to yourself.
>>Yes, our experiments get attention, but I wouldn't call them publicity stunts.
It sure looks a lot like your startup's publicity stunt. There is nothing wrong with marketing a product that people want.
>>The point is to give the world more data points of what happens when you put AI out in the world and let democracy do its thing.
How generous. I suppose you can justify any poor behavior as raising awareness about the consequences of said behavior. Littering trash to raise awareness of pollution? Even oil companies don't try to pull such a line on pollution. The public opinion on this stuff is pretty decisively negative: the institutions just haven't caught up yet to make fines for it but I don't see any reason to force an acceleration here. (more useful applications of AI will experience a blowback from the more anti-social applications).
>>Soon, a lot more people will do this at large scale because it will be easy. I hope we decide where we want AI in society before that.
We're all looking forward to this future. Other people doing something is not an excuse to do it; especially since they haven't even done it yet. From the look of things you have very clearly made your choice about how you want to use AI in society. I would point out that you're not particularly hard up for cash. You clearly have lots of talent and ability. You could be putting this to a better use. I would be happy to offer you a job. You really don't need to be doing this.
>>Personally, I'm very much pro a pause on large AI training for example. I hope our data could be useful as a grounding in such discussions.
This would be a more convincing line if you weren't actively trying to profit off using AI for the destruction of the commons. Using AI to cure cancer or male pattern baldness gives us something new that we can be excited about. This just gives us something crappier than what we had at someone else's expense. Putting people out of work with AI is going to cause problems. Maybe it's inevitable and maybe it can be good in other ways, but I strongly doubt it is the path to minimize p(doom). If you believe in a pause, then simply stop. Yes you will lose money: ask me how I know. What hope does a Pause have if smart and talented people are all so excited to be blitzing to an undesirable Nash equilibrium? You don't need to do this. You know it's not the right thing to do and that people don't like it. You don't need to run an experiment to know this, but you have now run three with the predictable outcome. There really isn't much excuse left. Please focus your talents and abilities on something better. AI can do some many things that are simply impossible today. We really could achieve new heights but this project really doesn't feel like the dawning of a golden age.
Not really. Public school teachers are well paid when you consider pension, tenure and low stability. Working in industry can pay more than teaching but this is not a guarantee. A public school teacher doesn’t get fired when they turn 40, or laid off in a downturn. It’s less about money and more about qualifications. having a chemistry degree is not the correct qualification to teach chemistry in a public high school. The labor market between stem practitioners and stem teachers are really not substitutes in any practical sense.
I've been multiple places were the teachers in high-mobility fields were bad because anyone good at them could move up easily. takes just one bad interaction with a superior or nagging from a spouse and poof.
This doesn't apply to people who love teaching, they're in it for different motivations.
To be clear the shoplifters in question are all rich themselves and stealing expensive items they don’t need. The original article is about students at one of the richest and most prestigious institutions in the country. None of the criminals are poor by any stretch of the imagination. They are just lousy people who are smart enough and entitled enough to try to justify their bad behavior.
Out of curiosity how much of this is a manifestation of the utility of LLMs? I get the current political impetus right now but also the barrier for swapping out an infra stack was also much higher 2 years ago. From my own projects major swaps are now relatively trivial which means that vendor lock in is weak.
Given how bad the US military performed against Iran, its pretty clear that any hostilities started by the US against NATO, would finish with a takeover of Washington within...2 weeks...
Where does this weird expectation come from that you can basically achieve your goals in a 2 week air campaign?
If the US wanted to they could probably do a lot of damage but, as you can see in Ukraine, taking over a country is a whole different thing. Unless you're willing to go in with the army and are willing to lose a LOT of people. And even then it'll take months or years for a single country
Besides some companies that were deep into the weeds of AWS and been pushed to enable and use every single AWS service by their reps, I don't think it's much harder/easier today than it was two years ago.
Sure, LLMs help a bit with the actual typing, but the hard part is still planning, alignment and actual execution, all which are best done by humans talking and working with other humans.
I don't think we're in the days of "Hey Codex migrate our AWS stack 100% to Hetzner VPS stat" yet, without issues along the way. Wouldn't claim it's impossible either, but again the easy parts were already easy, and the hard parts are still hard.
Architecting to make portability easier should absolutely be a thing. But people in the weeds of a specific public cloud provider today will absolutely need to make tradeoffs between getting to a position where they can be more portable and devoting those resources to other things.
> Architecting to make portability easier should absolutely be a thing.
It is, but it's really hard to make the right trade-offs. Usually I'd start by basically making a list of what could potentially be done to make it easier, check lightly how hard each one of those will be, then sit down with stakeholders and figure out the balance between how fast they want to move, and how risky they want the migration to be. Some opts for less safeguards and moving sooner, others for absolutely less risk but it takes the time it takes.
Some. Many companies have relied in the past on the fact that doing things is freaking complicated. Such as maintaining your own services instead of using something from a provider like AWS.
What used to be a half year transition project that will be half-assed due to resource constraints, can now be properly done in a month by a skilled engineering team works on it with LLM leverage.
Of course, if America was still a trusted ally (like if Harris was president), we still wouldn't be doing it. Even if it was easy now.
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