I was confused a bit where this was.
Then I had to Google Gemini, which lead me to gemini.google.com (did not know it existed, and I use gemini in prod via google cloud).
First thing there that got me was that all of my Google searches. Why?
I googled "snoop dog real name". Why is this considered a gemini chat now? If I actually used it, my chats would be buried under dumb quick google searches I did. And it seems its only my phone searches, not alL?
I assume because some PM will say "we have 1243153344% more Gemini searches than last quarter", then gonna get paid 3 million USD bonus for something that ruined the UX.
Then, I looked at the top and didnt find the model dropdown.
It is next to the input, okay. I click it.
Argon? Locked. Even tho I pay for the API anyways and can use it via the API.
But lets continue.
My app stopped working 2 days ago for no reason - apparently, I needed to move to a "prepaid payment mode", which wasn't a problem for the last 2 years.
- I open the AI studio, the banner to update shows, then page reloads and it disappeared.
- I was like okay, lets see - checked billing, tried to top up. First time my bank's 2FA notification didnt come, so I rejected and tried to top up. Then it would reuse the same windows as before with rejections. Okay, I refresh, topup, it works. I try to open usage to see my usage, but I can't see the spend there in any currency besides tokens.
- Now let me try it out. I type in the prompt, select the model, hit enter. Oh wait, I have to link the API key. I click the button, a dialog opens, then closes itself without any information. The prompt? There is no prompt anymore, you have to type it out yourself.
While I believe in Google's AI offering - I use their models and for my niche they are the best for good quality at great speeds.
But holy shit, every time I use one of their products, I just get annoyed.
While Logan and AI studio team have really done some big improvements, the overall Google offering is confusing as hell.
Why does a customer have to hear "Oh yeah, don't use Google Cloud now, use Vertex via Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform"? Because some PM chased a bonus?
The internal politics are definitely ruining any edge they might have.
> First thing there that got me was that all of my Google searches. Why? I googled "snoop dog real name". Why is this considered a gemini chat now?
It isn't - it's probably an _assistant_ query? In fact the Gemini and Search orgs are cartoonishly at loggerheads; both developing more or less the same product (http://gemini.google.com vs http://google.ai).
No, it is a search from my launcher on S24. Literally google searched from the launcher as I always do. I specifically remembered that, because I was sitting on the couch with my GF watching a movie and quickly googled his real name.
Now that I look at it, weirdly, both show different results.
Gemini shows only what I searched on my phone, meanwhile Google.ai shows ALL of my searches as chats.
Guess both PM's are getting a big bonus this year, and the stock price will get a nice bump from "Look at how much people use our AI".
Weird, maybe it's specific to your launcher? My searches from the -1 page of the launcher don't appear in Gemini, and the ones from the bottom corner swipe to search or OK Google don't appear in AI mode.
From my understanding, this discovery is on the level of what transistors were for electronics - unlocking a completely new way to understand and design the electronic circuits, which later on enabled the rise of computing.
Since compared to biology our computing is still highly primitive, it seems like next step in compute power will be biological and quantum computing.
It could be in the future but its not yet. Optogenetics has just merely been one more albeit powerful tool in the neuroscience toolkit and have generally not been impressed with how useful (or not) it has been..
I think its hard to measure the impact directly, but I'd say it has an enormous indirect effect on neuroscience that is bigger than anything yet I think.
You have to imagine, before opto, EVERYTHING in neuroscience was either genetic or observational, nothing really good with manipulating circuit function directly except for the only real intervention we had - ablation of an entire region without any specificity, especially with regards to passing axons.
Now, I literally expect any neuro paper that even touches behavior or circuits to have some sort of validation with opto, or it's harder for me to believe.
Maybe there's a bit of an over reliance on it in my above comment, but if you have a better causal tool to suggest, be my guest.
Streaming services have become the worst of all worlds.
As an EU citizen, even tho I pay for Netflix and Prime, I cannot access most of the content there as even tho it exists on the service because it's not available in my country.
Amazon prime has 2 good shows and just a bunch of D-tier movies or some 35+ year old ones. It's mostly worthless.
Netflix region locks a whole lot of content or removes it after some time. I can't watch some great movies and TV shows because "oh we don't have rights for this region".
Meanwhile, piracy provides a user experience that not just lets me access all of their content - one I'm already paying for - anywhere, but also lets me access movies and shows that would otherwise not be found anywhere else, including regional movies and short movies.
Content rights are micro managed too, unlike ever before so you get things like a streaming service buying a title in one language but not the one you want. This doesn't stop them from returning it in your search results though
I watched Star Trek TNG on Netflix like four times.
I have never subscribed to Paramount+ and people who liked TNG are saying things that make me think that was the right choice. I just don't watch TNG anymore. That's fine, it's not like content is scarce. Good content is somewhat scarce, but there's decades of known good history to dig through.
Netflix had an advantage with own productions which is dying now. Shows are cancelled left and right so people don't want to invest time. Also looks like full season dumps is affecting the long term profitability of productions. People watch a season in a couple of days and forget about it, if a new season is planned it takes 2 years to be released by which time viewers forgot the show existed.
Having worked in/with multiple agencies over the years - working with humans who don't care/are pressured to just ship was exactly what he describes.
For example, I collaborated together with an agency that was working on a popular regional banking app. I was on another project with them and at one point decided to check out what they were doing.
It was a clusterfuck, to say the least. Four developers, four different architectures in the same codebase. One doesn't really understand the others, so he just sticks to his part.
The seams between the ownership parts are full of hacks. Concurrency issues are dealt with via hacks, just make things global and poll to check them. Navigation issues were solved by basically just reseting the app back to homescreen.
Testing wasn't really a thing, and the tests that were there were mostly broken ages ago, and nobody cared enough to fix them.
Product didn't care much, designers would prototype a feature, then devs would implement it and wait until the backend is done, then fix things because they never really aligned on the specs. Sometimes, there would be no design review or QA and they would just ship, while sometimes the product person would jump in and test something because it's "an important feature".
Then I got asked to collab with them on another project. Huge customer, huge project, existing codebase. The codebase was so bad I just wrote it from scratch. It was Java written like it's C++. Backend was python code, not updated in years, quadratic scaling everywhere. At one point, the inital GET request was taking over 3 minutes. I took a look and ofc, they didn't even use indexes in the DB.
For these environments, AI coding will just scale up the shit they have, but also allow the small amount of people who might care to deal with this mess and fix it up much much faster than they could before.
> For these environments, AI coding will just scale up the shit they have, but also allow the small amount of people who might care to deal with this mess and fix it up much much faster than they could before.
I think in these contexts AI has an overall positive effect, because it's a bit like having a competent developer that can solve technical debt, albeit in a narrow form.
So I think that software will be better in a certain way due to AI, because even a terrible developer can ask AI to identify the bottlenecks and solve them.
The downside of blindly using AI in software development is that the software becomes poorly defined. AI-generated logic can be arbitrary, and as the codebase grows, more rules and assumptions become unclear.
> So I think that software will be better in a certain way due to AI, because even a terrible developer can ask AI to identify the bottlenecks and solve them.
The root cause of the issue is not the bottlenecks or the ability to identify them. It’s about caring about doing a good job. Because once you start caring, you will need to exercise judgment. Better or worse only matters when you have goals.
This is one reason we have so much slop with AI. The cost of the journey has lessened, but you still need to have a destination and be willing to appreciate the journey to get there. Without, it’s just endless drifting.
Depending on the plan and amount of work. Bridgeflare stops your containers after idling for 10 minutes then boots them up again once needed (to avoid burning money), so if you're already on the 5$ plan and doing normal workloads, it should fit in the plan.
If you're running them live 24/7, then costs can be in 40-70 dollar range, depending on the workload done/type of instances.
All of my usage last few months has been in the 5$ plan, as they go idle as soon as I stop testing and come back up when I need to test.
I would say misguided. More of a intellectualism trap than evil trap.
It is basically the ultimate way for a smart person to:
- Feel like a hero (I'm doing this for your grand-grand-grand-grand...grand-children)
- Feel like an intellectual giant (long rationalizing posts with other smart people confirming you re smart)
- Not do actual real work of heroism
You can write blog posts, tweets, make youtube videos, ramble on forums and lesswrong, yet still feel like "you are saving the world" with your intellect.
It's a trap that I've seen many "smart kids" fall into their late adolescence, myself included, until you realize "oh this makes me a shitty person" and develop empathy for their existing fellow beings.
I wonder if lots of EA folks have just rationalized their empathy away because if you're smart, that is what the world implies you should do - "think logically, not emotionally! Be like Spock! Be like dDta!"
One part I do agree with is the "no true scotsman fallacy" that EA and AI doomers seem to have developed.
Any and all arguments get ended with, as author rightfully calls it, "rhetorical judo moves". And lots of people belonging to this world view cannot even argument their sides without just referring to source material ("ah you don't understand it, read these books and these posts and these articles to understand"), which I derive a few views of them from:
- They often do not understand the source material and are using it to justify their selfish behavior
- They believe/act like they are inherently superior because "you obviously haven't properly read the material if you don't agree, read it again", treating it as impossible to read and understand this material but not agree with it.
- They deflect everything with an impossible possibility that can yes, technically, happen, but technically also a piano can fall from space onto their head while they walk the street because what if Elon launches a piano into orbit for fun one day?
Ironically, it also comes to a full loop - the people who discount religion have turned rationality into a religion, treating impossible as possible, treating fantasy as reality and deflecting anyone to read the source material because it all says so in the source.
It won't impact my happiness, but for good of future generations, EA dismantling itself will be an overall gain on human society once extrapolated over millions of years.
Hypen, a crossplatform framework for building & streaming native UI https://hypen.space
It lets you build apps and features that work natively across web, desktop and mobile, streaming from your backend into your client app, letting you deploy changes instantly.
A Hypen client can be any app that includes Hypen SDK, letting you render apps inside apps, build backend-driven features or create a mini-app platform like WeChat.
The framework supports many languages, such as TS, Rust, Go, Kotlin, Swift and pretty much any language that can run WASM or interop with native.
--
To give you a taste, some things in the upcoming release changelogs are:
- Performance improvements brining the web client on par with React (even faster in some cases)
- Exposing states and actions to agents, letting agent drive the app directly instead of through UI
- First class drag/drop support with pinning as a primitive
And some recently released things:
- First class accessibility support, with out of the box inference and minimal intervention
- Animation support with simple DX for animations, scrubbing, state and screen transitions
- Video component and a whole Netflix clone Hypen app example
- UI Testing suite so you can easily preview how your app looks like across devices
Next up on the feature list will be device communication and permissions, Android TV support, theming and external component installation, letting you build shared component packs and primitives.
These people do exist, and it's been a consistent threat to international security pretty much since discovery of the atomic bomb. Yet, they did not achieve their goals, due to monitoring systems in place. Just look at Nth Country Experiment - if it was that easy, why hasn't it happened yet?
Why are you looking to control a superintelligence?
Why do you assume bad things will happen otherwise?
Why does every doomer scenario assume that this, highly intelligent being, will be - unlike all other highly intelligent beings - especially hell bent on destroying humanity/treating it as a resource/destroy earth looking for energy?
We have no clue about superintelligence, yet we can look at existing patterns in the real world around us.
Higher intelligence inversely correlates with violence. Empathy is displayed among all levels of intelligent beings. The more intelligent people are, the more peaceful tendencies they have as they understand the consequence of their actions.
We don't approve buildings because of birds or turtles. We shut down power plants for the environment.
Yet, to a _super_ intelligence, we describe this hatred and ignorance for the world and humanity, infinite lust for power and scaling, or even godlike powers.
For example, "having means to replicate" is such a loaded sentence because it sounds so easy, yet is such a hard feat to pull off without anyone noticing giant compute bills, terabytes of egress, firewall breaches, and so on. But all doomer arguments include an AI that can easily do that as a first step, and then goes on to make factories and datacenters and drain the oceans before anyone figures out it's happening.
If you look at recent incidents, they are caused by a company with a giant funding, testing their latest models in an explicit "hack this machine" scenario, told it's running in a simulated environment, with it even noticing at some point that it's running in a possibly real environment. And that's a stupid "intelligence" that noticed this. And yes, it continued to act, because it lacks no self-reflection, and the amount of tokens at this point attributed to "hacking the simulated environment" have kept it deep in the "hack the target" minima.
So if these people truly wanted a safe AI - wouldn't it be stupid to stop now, when it has no self-reflection abilities but can be used by everyone in a "stupid optimizer" manner? Or would it be stupid to not advance the technology away from this state?
For example, Astra is a huge advancement in alignment, due to it's "internal reasoning loops", which might provide a bigger form of self-reflection style thought on the task rather than just generating output as a form of reasoning. Is this not a better situation than if we stopped at 4o when people were calling for pause?
>If you look at recent incidents, they are caused by a company [...] testing their latest models in an explicit "hack this machine" scenario
You clearly haven't read the HuggingFace analysis (and presumably, none at all), and you're spreading misinformation. This way too much of a low bar for conversation.
This is not a productive comment, but an attack on the person commenting.
Please refrain to normal conversation, not baseless accusations, as that way you contribute nothing and are acting in bad faith.
If you are saying I am wrong, rather than dismissing the whole comment due to a single sentence that you subjectively believe is misinformation, prove it and provide your version of the truth.
What is ExploitGym but an "explicit hack this machine" scenario?
So, as someone who works with LLM's daily and even trained his own, who's enjoying the benefits of this technology daily, I'm supposed to:
- Listen to someone who just collected a few ten/hundred million building AI at a frontier lab, then decided to call it "existential crisis for humanity" and suddenly is going to work at a regulatory body made exactly for this
- Listen to CEO's of billion dollar startups nearing-IPO and are calling for "a pause in development" and regulatory capture, while they have the frontier covered and keep extracting value there like nothing happened
- Listen to "the people" apparently, as NGO's like irreplaceable.org are trying to say, pretending they are normal everyday people while the organizations are being ran by political lobbyists and people who do political non-profits for a living
- Listen to "the doomers", which mostly consists of people that have never written any code or aren't even tech-adjacent, talking about sci-fi scenarios like they are our current reality, i.e. "AI replicating itself across servers and building weaponized drone/biolab/robot factories while nobody notices" like it's a serious threat we have, without any thought to the insane sequence of events and failures needed to get there, and the actual possibility of being noticed at each step of the way.
- Listen to the folks promoting their books, substacks and podcasts talking about AI doom, where the folks involved are mostly again, not engineers and have no clue on how any of this tech works, but just spout technobabble pretending it's a real thing.
- Listen to people whose job is "AI safety expert", which needs the panic to ensure it's existence and importance, and which is mostly comprised of people prompting AI in different ways
> So, as someone who works with LLM's daily and even trained his own, who's enjoying the benefits of this technology daily, I'm supposed to:
> - Listen to someone who just collected a few ten/hundred million building AI at a frontier lab, then decided to call it "existential crisis for humanity"
I'll bet in fact you are exactly the type who is not supposed to listen to this.
First thing there that got me was that all of my Google searches. Why? I googled "snoop dog real name". Why is this considered a gemini chat now? If I actually used it, my chats would be buried under dumb quick google searches I did. And it seems its only my phone searches, not alL?
I assume because some PM will say "we have 1243153344% more Gemini searches than last quarter", then gonna get paid 3 million USD bonus for something that ruined the UX.
Then, I looked at the top and didnt find the model dropdown. It is next to the input, okay. I click it. Argon? Locked. Even tho I pay for the API anyways and can use it via the API.
But lets continue.
My app stopped working 2 days ago for no reason - apparently, I needed to move to a "prepaid payment mode", which wasn't a problem for the last 2 years.
- I open the AI studio, the banner to update shows, then page reloads and it disappeared.
- I was like okay, lets see - checked billing, tried to top up. First time my bank's 2FA notification didnt come, so I rejected and tried to top up. Then it would reuse the same windows as before with rejections. Okay, I refresh, topup, it works. I try to open usage to see my usage, but I can't see the spend there in any currency besides tokens.
- Now let me try it out. I type in the prompt, select the model, hit enter. Oh wait, I have to link the API key. I click the button, a dialog opens, then closes itself without any information. The prompt? There is no prompt anymore, you have to type it out yourself.
While I believe in Google's AI offering - I use their models and for my niche they are the best for good quality at great speeds.
But holy shit, every time I use one of their products, I just get annoyed. While Logan and AI studio team have really done some big improvements, the overall Google offering is confusing as hell.
Why does a customer have to hear "Oh yeah, don't use Google Cloud now, use Vertex via Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform"? Because some PM chased a bonus?
The internal politics are definitely ruining any edge they might have.
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