However, surely by now even the lay people who have seen the testimonies before Congress, the lawsuits and the excesses by Meta execs over and over again ought to be atleast somewhat wary of handing them more personal data?

I think the average person has very similar self preservation instincts as the rest of us. So it can't be that. Which leaves the fact that there are lot of people who don't know about the above mentioned scandals galore that Meta has been involved in?

While people might remember it for other more striking ideas, I was impressed with how it expounds the theory behind the claims that "intelligence implies violence". That entire narrative was quite chilling.

That, and the way the author explains how to establish a means of communication using just... pain.

It's a brilliant book.

You extrapolated that to assuming that AI news was my only use case.

Am saying that a lot of us like HN the way it is, and the way it has evolved organically into a firehose of AI news.

Keeping abreast of fast moving AI developments with informed opinions/comments for various new models/agents etc. is primarily what I'm here for.

Because in another dead language of antiquity, Sanskrit, it means "weapon". Which would be a bit too on-the-nose.

I don't think there's going to be a rush to outsource. In fact, I suspect that it's quite the opposite scenario going to play out.

Primarily because now that the cost to produce the boring/mundane stuff that is the stuff of outsourcing (internal tooling, dashboards, ERP, integrations, QA etc.), it will likely be much more cost effective to hire 3 devs in the US and give them hefty token budgets and have much easier coordination and communication loops than outsourcing to a Bangalore body shop that will try and bill you 15 engineers for the same work.

In fact, word on the street here is that there's a significant correction in the Bangalore realty market for the first time in history thanks to the IT salaries drying up. [1]

I suspect LLMs are going to have a global worldwide deflationary effect what with white collar salaries at risk. The only counter acting force might be the distortions caused by recent wars and tariff shenanigans of the US government.

But even having said all of that I am hopeful for the eventual benefits human beings can reap from the advent of LLMS. The only thing that keeps me up at night is my lack of faith in the aging gerontocracy (worldwode phenomenon) that all our futures are in the hands of that seems to be ill equipped to handle this period of what is most likely massive upheaval and uncertainty.

[1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/real-estate/news/housing...

Secondly, even with that being true, I think open models are a great net benefit for all mankind in the long run.

I think both of those things are true at the same time.

Nevertheless, I doubt anyone's going to emerge unscathed when the valuations start falling though. Vast sections of the American stock market will be wiped out yet and with it the global economy.

And typically (though not always) product managers have better people skills than programmers and consequently they might be more effective at the "gathering requirements" and "working together" bits you mentioned above.

Even much of the "validating releases" and "testing" parts should also be things that a decent PM should be able to wrangle now by themselves with some LLM agents to assist them. Afterall, why bother about code quality of a testing harness. So long as the PM can keep a coherent test case list and have end to end tests that cover them, programmers can leave that to them as well.

This is the crux of everything you've written and I strongly disagree. The purpose of knowledge is the sheer power it brings, and if there's factory scale churning out of it, I'll gladly take it.

As a closer analogy, consider this probability (I'll be stealing from the game Stellaris here): let's say a few hundred years later, when we are spacefaring, we discover a vast cache/library of knowledge of an alien civilization, we won't just pass up on exploiting it because we need to "enjoy the process of acquiring it on our own" or "derive the satisfaction of sharing the discovery with others". No, I and I daresay most others will take as much as we can without restraint in a quest to make all our lives better/more enjoyable.

And if that's ok to do, using machine intelligence to mine/grab any new knowledge or new math as Tao is suggesting here should also be acceptable and welcomed.

In the vast majority of the developing world, there are hardly any of those!

Here's a glimpse of what public education in India is like:

https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/the-sorry-state-of-education-in-in...

To all the detractors, I would like to point out that your opinion of kids needing a good human teacher is overfit to your experience of having had some of those growing up.

In third world countries like mine, we grow up with absolutely unqualified teachers who were unable to muster anything but a learnt-by-rote understanding of key concepts.

In hindsight these were just desperate adults trying to eek a living for themselves and their family in an impoverished country and resorting to any means by which to do it: gaming the school system or calling in favours to join school faculty. I bear them no ill will. But we as kids were much worse off for it.

I can assure you that no matter what concerns you may have about hallucinations in LLMs, I can bet everything I have that a reasonably modern model (and I'm thinking in the range of gemini-flash, not Fable) in a well designed harness geared towards tutoring would handily and repeatedly outperform every single teacher I had all throughout my schooling.

Don't let a quest for the perfect ruin what is likely already way better than status quo.

You can get the LLM to run a script which checks for all of these and also enforce them by running the same script as a pre-commit hook. Setting this up religiously in every code base I work on has been what's given me the most mileage with agentic coding.

I wrote down a more detailed post of the various linters I use here:

https://www.balajeerc.info/Use-Deterministic-Guardrails-for-...

Since the OP was about achieving flow state and focus, I thought this was relevant.

1. Sit somewhere comfortable. Sitting "cross legged" or with your "back straight" as the guide linked to above advocates is not necessary. A comfortable chair/couch is fine.

2. The room should preferably be quiet. Though if you have the privilege of access to an outdoor courtyard that's quiet other than birdsong and chirp of insects, you'll probably enjoy it more. But a quiet room is good enough.

3. Phase 1: Set a timer on your watch/phone for 5 mins. Close your eyes. And let your mind wander. Doesn't matter what your mind drifts towards.

4. Phase 2: Restart the 5 min timer. Now, try quieten your mind of thoughts and focus instead on just your breathing. Be gentle with yourself. Your mind will wander again and that's fine. Just gently nudge it back to your breathing.

That's pretty much it. Slowly, over months try and increase Phase 2 from 5 to 10 mins.

When I described this to my partner, I used the analogy of treating your mind like a curious eager pup. In the first phase, cutting of external stimulus of sight by closing your eyes is like having the pup with you in a closed room.

In phase 2, you gently hold the puppy near you and get it to quiet down and stay still.

She mentioned that this analogy helped her a lot.

Honestly, this is pretty much the gist of it. I suspect that you will likely get most of the benefits of advanced meditative techniques with just the 2 simple steps from above. YMMV.

Be patient though. Getting to a fully calm state of mind takes months of practice.

https://guitar-tools.eejalab.xyz/

There are plenty of other tools already that do this but hopefully this one adds some quality of life niceties such as dark mode and a mobile responsive design that seems nicer to use than the others out there.

Hope the colours look ok. I'm a colour blind person (deuteranomaly) and I've optimised it for what looks good to me. Am open to adding a mode in line with what regular vision people might prefer.

No frameworks used, vanilla JS. No sign ups. Data/state persistence is purely local storage.

Absolutely no commercial interest here. Built this purely for the love of it. Will forever be free.

Thanks for the feedback. Let me know how it goes. Happy to incorporate more changes.

There are plenty of other tools already that do this but hopefully this one adds some quality of life niceties such as dark mode and a mobile responsive design that seems nicer to use than the others out there.

Hope the colours look ok. I'm a colour blind person (deuteranomaly) and I've optimised it for what looks good to me. Am open to adding a mode in line with what regular vision people might prefer.

No frameworks used, vanilla JS. No sign ups. Data/state persistence is purely local storage.

Absolutely no commercial interest here. Built this purely for the love of it. Will forever be free.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48333089

Points: 4

# Comments: 4