I grew up in East Germany, and while it was a total failure, they got at least one idea correct in the workers paradise: We need to work. (Never mind the implementation, I already said it was a total failure, okay? It's about problem recognition, not about the quality of the solution.)

And you know what? I'm actually like my grandfather, who without any need whatsoever continued to work well past retirement, privately, painting a house here, doing some paint shop there, designing and installing a sun dial somewhere. He only got off the scaffolding on a house's paint job a week before he died.

I too would hate to just laze around. I LOVE doing useful stuff. I worked and made money many times as a child already, and it was always fun!

What stopped the fun was the coming of The West (which I too went to the streets for and wanted, still, "side effects may apply"). While I studied CS I took a job in a chocolate factory, not because I needed the money, but because that's what I always did and was used to. Being in the production of stuff is actually FUN! Except then came some western management idiot to make it clear fun is over. I had just setup a machine to work as efficiently and as well as possible (because that's fun!), so now I had to wait a few minutes for it to finish. Just a few minutes, no time to start something else. So I briefly sat next to it and waited for it to finish. In comes the management idiot, immediately jumping on me, why am I lazing around??? That's not what they pay me for!

Just an anecdote, and of course it is much better in knowledge jobs, but that, and the fact that the money accumulates towards the top is what I think is a HUGE problem in today's capitalism. No wonder they have to make live as miserable as possible for the working majority, because there is no fun. The managers and owners think we don't want to work, and treat us accordingly. But it is THEM who are responsible for much of that.

1 MB RAM, 1.44 MB floppy drive

SM 124: 640x400 pixels, monochrome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST https://www.atarimuseum.de/1040st.htm

The software used a special driver to get better than standard quality from the then most common 24 pin printers (laser printers where much expensive) by kind of double-printing, I forgot the details. It looked really good though.

https://www.planetemu.net/screenshots/Atari%20ST%20-%20Appli...

https://stcarchiv.de/tos/1990/11/script-2 (German)

"Script" was the cheap version of their better product "Signum".

https://www.application-systems.de/signum/screenshots.html

https://www.atariuptodate.de/img/signum.png

That is the very basis of our currency, and the basic idea is a good one in an idea-heavy economy more reliant on innovation than natural resource constraints. Also, if truly becomes too much we will just have one of the many many currency changes. My grandparents lived with about five (could be as many as seven) currencies throughout their (German) lives, for example.

As long as the real values remain, the factories, the people, the roads, the buildings, that is not a problem overall. It's not like people can emigrate to alien worlds, and on earth the places with the best real economy will be where they will go - have to go.

Money is the carrot dangled in front of us to keep us moving and to create real value things. The carrot can be updated and changed if the current one starts to lose its appeal, it is not what ultimately matters. The point of view of an individual and the big picture are very different things.

I think we all do???

Even if I'm not coding a lot, I use it every day for small tasks. There is not much to code in my job, IT in a small traditional-goods export business. The tasks range from deciphering some coded EDI messages (D.96A as text or XML, for example), summarizing a bunch of said messages (DESADV, ORDERSP, INVOIC), finding missing items, Excel formula creation for non-trivial questions, and the occasional Python script, e.g. to concatenate data some supplier sent in a certain way.

AI is so strange because it is BOTH incredibly useful and incredibly random and stupid. Among the latter, see a comment in my history I made earlier today, the AI does not tell me when it uses a heuristic and does not provide an accurate result. EVERY result it shows me it shows as final and authoritative and perfect. Even when after questioning it suddenly "admits" that it actually skipped a few steps and that's not the correct final result.

Once AI gets some actual "I" I'm sure the revolution some people are commenting about will actually happen, but I fear that's still some way off. Until then, lots of sudden hallucinations and unexpected wrong results - unexpected because normal people believe the computer when it claims it successfully finished the task and presents a result as correct.

Until then it's daily highs and lows with little in between, either it brilliantly really solves some task, or it fails and that includes telling you about it.

A junior engineer will at least learn, but the AI stays pretty constant in how it fails and does not actually learn anything. The maker providing a new model version is not the AI learning.

That said, a well-reasoned text should probably go on a blog site, not here, or here only as link. Otherwise you are wasting a lot of effort, with only few people even noticing your comment and the discussion soon entirely disappearing into history.

It retuned formulas and executed them and presented a final result. It looked good.

Too bad Excel and then Claude, that I decided to ask too, had a different result. 3.4-something vs. 3.8-something.

ChatGPT, when asked:

> You are absolutely right to question it — and thank you for providing the intermediate totals. My previous calculation was incorrect. I mis-summed the data. With a dataset this long, a manual aggregation can easily go wrong.

(Less than 40 small integer values is "this long"? Why did you not tell me?)

and

> Why my earlier result was wrong

> I incorrectly summed:

> The weights (reported 487 instead of 580)

> The weighted products (reported 1801.16 instead of 1977.83)

> That propagated into the wrong final value.

Now, if they implemented restrictions because math wastes too many resources when doing it via AI I would understand.

BUT, there was zero indication! It presented the result as final and correct.

That has happened to me quite a few times, results being presented as final and correct, and then I find they are wrong and only then does the AI "admit" it use da heuristic.

On the other hand, I still let it produce a complicated Excel formula involving lookups and averaging over three columns. That part works perfectly, as always. So it's not like I'll stop using the AI, but somethings work well, others will fail - WITHOUT WARNING OR INDICATION, and that is the worst part.

https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...

> Police in Spain have reportedly started profiling people based on their phones; specifically, and surprisingly, those carrying Google Pixel devices. Law enforcement officials in Catalonia say they associate Pixels with crime because drug traffickers are increasingly turning to these phones. But it’s not Google’s secure Titan M2 chip that has criminals favoring the Pixel — instead, it’s GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused alternative to the default Pixel OS.

EDIT: Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44473694

Just like billions are not about "being rich", this is about CONTROL. Control of the economy, and how people live, and control over one's own life.

Abstraction is a beast, putting everything regardless of what it actually is as some $$ number is terrible for understanding. The billionaires don't have Scrooge McDuck money at home where they swim in coins, they control huge parts of the economy.

And as long as they need workers, they will want them to live not too well - that would raise the price of labor, if people wanted to do work in places like Amazon warehouses to begin with, if they had better alternatives not working for the billionaires.

Being "poor" in this context means having a lot less control over how you live, not that you live on the streets. Although, as soon as you lose your value, e.g. by getting too sick, that is always on the table too.

Or, try organizing any kind of movement that those with power don't like. It does not even have to be violent! Here in Germany, as soon as the previous government with the Green Party was in power, a huge never-ending campaign started. Easy - after all, the vast majority of the important media is owned by very few, just like in the US. Funny enough, after inevitably that government failed, turned out the CDU failed many if not most of the promises made, and in other areas does exactly what they heavily criticized.

The point is, surveillance, "soft" punishments, and media control and reach are on a whole new level. Trump wanted TikTok for a reason, and Musk wanted X not for the money that company could make.

The more tech we have, and it's conveniently concentrated too, the worse it can get if you don't want to play that game.

On top pf that, debt and a system of law heavily skewed for those with money, just because of its complexity and to gain access, and no more competition for minds from a block of socialist countries, so no clear alternative apart from obviously stupid ideas most people won't want to vote for, and this "democratic" system can go very far towards being very controlling and restricting for many.

We can see for example in Iran, or few decades ago in China, or since it was founded in North Korea what happens when people protest - and how nothing changes. Now we have billionaires who would love to have similar powers, who don't want to be "held back" by laws and regulations.

You also need more than one simple brain structure simulation repeated a lot. Our brains have many different parts and structures, not just a single type.

However, just like our airplanes do not resemble bird flight as the early dreamers of human flight dreamed of, with flapping wings, I also do not see a need for our technology to fully reproduce the original.

We are better off following our own tech path and seeing where it will lead. It will be something else, and that's fine, because anyone can create a new human brain without education and tools, with just some sex, and let it self-assemble.

Biology is great and all but also pretty limited, extremely path-dependent. Just look at all the materials we already managed to create that nature would never make. Going off the already trodden bio-path should be good, we can create a lot of very different things. Those won't be brains like ours that "Feel" like ours, if that word will ever even apply. and that's fine and good. Our creations should explore entirely new paths. All these comparisons to the human experience make me sad, let's evaluate our products on their own merit.

One important point:

If you truly want a copy, partial or full, in tech, of the human experience, you need to look at the physics. Not at some meta stuff like "text"!!

The physical structure and the electrical signals in the brain. THAT is us. And electrical signals and what they represent in chips are so completely and utterly different from what can be found in the brain, THAT is the much more important argument against silly human "AGI" comparisons. We don't have a CPU and RAM. We have massively parallel waves of electrical signals in a very complex structure.

Humans are hung up on words. We even have fantasy stories hat are all about it. You say some word, magic happens. You know somebody's "true name", you control them.

But the brain works on a much lower deeply physical level. We don't even need language. A human without language and "inner voice" still is a human with the same complex brain, just much worse at communication.

The LLMs are all about the surface layer of that particular human ability though. And again, that is fine, but it has nothing to do with how our brains work. We looked at nature and were inspired, and went and created something else. As always.

As an ex East German, I wonder how much of it is the disappearance of the competing model. Some of the old communists actually warned about this. Don't get me wrong, I participated in the demonstrations back then, socialism had clearly failed as a society and economically. Does not make that particular idea wrong though. The powerful want to go back, take back the power they think is theirs, consciously or as a reflex.

Note that Europe, Germany in particular, are far from the "socialist" examples some, or many, Americans think, welfare state and all that. Fact is, when it comes to rigid stratification of society, who rules, who owns, Germany is far on the side of capital, and according to a study the few thousand people at the very top are from the same 4% of the population almost exclusively.

What is happening in the US is happening in more places. Here in Germany we too now have more and more attacks on social systems. It's never the fault of inept leadership, no the people must work more and longer! They have zero new ideas. That is the only one they can think of. I am not really exaggerating, even the representatives of our powerful "Mittelstand" (much of Germany's industry) heavily criticized especially the conservative CDU in the government only a few days ago, publicly.

I see no reason to try to blame the Chinese, or the Russians, or anyone. All of it comes from within, and not just in the US.

This prevents the consumers from slacking off and enjoying life, instead they have to continue to work work work. They get to consume a little, and work much more (after all, they also have to pay interest, and for consumer credits and credits that the masses get that adds up to a lot).

In this scenario, it does not even matter that many are unable to pay off all that debt. As long as the amount of work that is extracted from them significantly exceeds the amount of consumption allowed to them all is fine.

The chains that bind used to be metal, but we progressed and became a civilized society. Now it's the financial system and the laws. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” (Anatole France)

Last time I checked the chips are not rewiring themselves like the brain does, nor does even the software rewrite itself, or the model recalibrate itself - anything that could be called "learning", normal daily work for a human brain.

Also, the models are not models of the world, but of our text communication only.

Human brains start by building a model of the physical world, from age zero. Much later, on top of that foundation, more abstract ideas emerge, including language. Text, even later. And all of it on a deep layer of a physical world model.

The LLM has none of that! It has zero depth behind the words it learned. It's like a human learning some strange symbols and the rules governing their appearance. The human will be able to reproduce valid chains of symbols following the learned rules, but they will never have any understanding of those symbols. In the human case, somebody would have to connect those symbols to their world model by telling them the "meaning" in a way they can already use. For the LLM that is not possible, since it doesn't habe such a model to begin with.

How anyone can even entertain the idea of "AGI" based on uncomprehending symbol manipulation, where every symbol has zero depth of a physical world model, only connections to other symbols, is beyond me TBH.

The welfare state for corporate interests is alive and well though, and costs much more.

(2025) "Corporate Welfare in the Federal Budget" -- https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/corporate-welfare-feder...

(2024) https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/07/16/100-years-of-risi...

> There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states

Okay? Let's get rid of that much more expensive type of welfare then!

As if we have "real capitalism" - not even on a scale of local bakeries any more. Even the small businesses often are just a shop owned by a corporation. Not that I'm against some level of concentration, a lot of economic activity requires it. A lot of products are too expensive and require a certain scale to be viable at all.

What is the goal of economic activity anyway? For the few to live well, while the majority struggles? By "struggle" I don't mean that the majority already lives in the streets, to me it is enough that they have to be afraid. Of getting sick, of losing the job, of anything bad happening. I saw myself how a single unfortunate event could spiral out of control, and a guy making a lot of money in enterprise sales ended up alone, broken, and sick in the streets. I count all those having to fear such a development as part of the "losers", even if they are still making money and living in their house now. That fear, suppressed or not, should not be necessary, and it influences stress levels and decisions, consciously or not.

I mean, you are also right with your message, and I actually agree.

The flow of money around and away from too many people should not be happening. Being part of the economy should be easy for the majority, and real "welfare" should only be necessary for the sick and otherwise temporarily or fully disabled.

If a lot of normal people need welfare, something is not right.

But then you need an economy that provides those easy options to participate and get enough of a share.

You also need a system where an unfortunate event (or some) does not put you into an unescapable downward spiral, and provide a way back into the economy.

Famous example - but by no means do I want to single out that company and product: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

From my own experience, I kept this post bookmarked because I too worked on that project in the late 1990s, you cannot review those changes anyway. It is handled as described, you keep tweaking stuff until the tests pass. There is fundamentally no way to understand the code. Maybe its different in some very core parts, but most of it is just far too messy. I tried merely disentangling a few types ones, because there were a lot of duplicate types for the most simple things, such as 32 bit integers, and it is like trying to pick one noodle out of a huge bowl of spaghetti, and everything is glued and knotted together, so you always end up lifting out the entire bowl's contents. No AI necessary, that is just how such projects like after many generations of temporary programmers (because all sane people will leave as soon as they can, e.g. once they switched from an H1B to a Green Card) under ticket-closing pressure.

I don't know why since the beginning of these discussions some commenters seem to work off wrong assumptions that thus far our actual methods lead to great code. Very often they don't, they lead to a huge mess over time that just gets bigger.

And that is not because people are stupid, its because top management has rationally determined that the best balance for overall profits does not require perfect code. If the project gets too messy to do much the customers will already have been hooked and can't change easily, and when they do, some new product will have already replaced the two decades old mature one. Those customers still on the old one will pay premium for future bug fixes, and the rest will jumpt to the new trend. I don't think AI can make what's described above any, or much worse.

The web novel website RoyalRoad has two different tags that stories can/should add: AI-Assisted and AI-Generated.

Their policy: https://www.royalroad.com/blog/57/royal-road-ai-text-policy

> In this policy, we are going to separate the use of AI for text, into 3 categories: General Assistive Technologies, AI-Assisted, AI-Generated

The first category does not require tagging the story, only the other two do.

> The new tags are as such:

> AI-Assisted: The author has used an AI tool for editing or proofreading. The story thus reflects the author’s creativity and structure, but it may use the AI’s voice and tone. There may be some negligible amount of snippets generated by AI.

> AI-Generated: The story was generated using an AI tool; the author prompted and directed the process, and edited the result.

You are either misinformed, willfully ignorant or lying, and I've had it with this discussion style.

Yes, people who use "no one is illegal" do also say "no more borders". Not every single one, clearly humans are diverse, but your statement is just false.

Here a UK example even combining the statements (as I said, the movement is not limited to the US). https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.11073215

Another example, also showing this is an older movement (2005): https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/news/2005/apr/int... ("No Borders/No One Is Illegal campaigns")