Adys's recent activity
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Comment on Blizzard Entertainment files lawsuit against World of Warcraft private server Turtle WoW in ~games
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Comment on America tips into fascism in ~society
Adys Link ParentI really don’t enjoy seeing this take that just because it’s not as bad as in other countries it’s not fascism get. Fascism is a continuity of a country’s systems. The USA had incredibly robust...- Exemplary
I really don’t enjoy seeing this take that just because it’s not as bad as in other countries it’s not fascism get.
Fascism is a continuity of a country’s systems. The USA had incredibly robust systems which is why it’s not yet fascism - they haven’t been fully dismantled yet, it takes time.
But if you had less protections from the get go, by now you’d be 1938 Germany and that’s all.
“Bad but disrespectful” - no, it’s disrespectful to those who built the protections against fascism to ignore that those are getting dismantled to allow for more and more overreach.
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The most cutting-edge science of 1845
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Comment on How to get a backpack sold by Decathlon in EU to the US? in ~life.style
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Comment on How to get a backpack sold by Decathlon in EU to the US? in ~life.style
Adys Link ParentIf it's cheaper BE->US than UK feel free to take a look - if you find it on http://decathlon.be/ ill be happy to ship it to you from Brussels. edit...If it's cheaper BE->US than UK feel free to take a look - if you find it on http://decathlon.be/ ill be happy to ship it to you from Brussels.
Btw if you're patient, I have acquaintances that regularly go to the US and may be able to just bring it on a plane and ship it from the US.
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Comment on Study: Giving cash to mothers in Kenya cut infant deaths by 48% in ~health
Adys Link ParentI like your practical thinking. Of course you could have replaced "cut" by "reduced" :PI like your practical thinking. Of course you could have replaced "cut" by "reduced" :P
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Comment on Study: Giving cash to mothers in Kenya cut infant deaths by 48% in ~health
Adys Link ParentActually same here. I did a double take …Actually same here. I did a double take …
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Adys Link ParentDidn’t mean for the response to sound harsh, sorry. The post said “correct me if I’m wrong” so I reused that same wording :) And I agree with you to a great extent that it’s a terminology problem....Didn’t mean for the response to sound harsh, sorry. The post said “correct me if I’m wrong” so I reused that same wording :)
And I agree with you to a great extent that it’s a terminology problem. It’s the same problem I allude to in the OP I think.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Adys Link ParentRight now I don’t square it. I absolutely agree with you and I understand the implications… the thing is, this is such a massive differentiator that there is no catching up at the individual...Right now I don’t square it. I absolutely agree with you and I understand the implications… the thing is, this is such a massive differentiator that there is no catching up at the individual level.
My company actually is working on researching better ways to democratize the access. But we can’t do it puritanically: being practical is how we can actually get results.
Use these incredibly powerful tools to shape and create the future you believe is better for everyone. Even if that future doesn’t include said tools.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Adys Link ParentYeah you’re wrong- genai is being used actively in dd and molecule discovery. I get that most people have this idea that ChatGPT came out and now every company that says they “use ai” is simply...Yeah you’re wrong- genai is being used actively in dd and molecule discovery.
I get that most people have this idea that ChatGPT came out and now every company that says they “use ai” is simply offering a ChatGPT account to their employees so they can write emails faster. But it’s not the case and the impact is massive.
It helps once you understand that these are not “advanced text autocomplete” but “informed decision engines”.
Here’s a case from Exscientia: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/exscientia-generative-ai/
And here’s the biggest of all, Isomorphic Labs; deep mind people are working on this: https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/
Is an llm going to one shot publish a paper about a new drug it discovered? No. But this isn’t how these things are used.
Drug companies are not being super public about this unfortunately so I don’t have much to offer in terms of details, but being in Belgium I hang out with several of the people working on this — Pfizer in particular is super bullish on genai and they’re actively working on it. You don’t hear about it because it takes a long time to put these processes in place and guarantee + verify the entire chain of reliability.
It’s the same in construction … there’s massive advances being made there but you won’t hear about them until they pass the certifications. And in the mean time of course naysayers will claim they’ll never pass those certifications but highly engineering driven companies wouldn’t be spending tens of millions on this R&D if “someone with zero experience in the sector who can obviously see this won’t work” was worth listening to.
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Talking defence
I’m curious to get a read of where people’s heads are at regarding defence - be it innovation, funding or working in it in general (in particular in Europe but please contextualise with your...
I’m curious to get a read of where people’s heads are at regarding defence - be it innovation, funding or working in it in general (in particular in Europe but please contextualise with your country if you’re commenting).
Still five years ago, most people’s view was rather negative on it. I’ve seen attitude change significantly but I’d love hear opinions.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Adys Link ParentA lot of the "Rich People Money" is entirely make believe, built out of overleveraged nonsensical financial systems. Elon got investments in order to buy his own company at his own valuation, to...A lot of the "Rich People Money" is entirely make believe, built out of overleveraged nonsensical financial systems.
Elon got investments in order to buy his own company at his own valuation, to justify valuations in a dead acquisition made out of mostly the same shit, and this works because he has /some/ money. It's a modern day ponzi scheme that relies on a mix of financial privacy and charisma to pull off.
Similar levers are available to most people with some side cash saved up if they know it. Can be used for good if you know how to do it. I taught a friend of mine how to turn an extra 30k/yr she didn't know what to do with, into a 1M investment fund for green tech. She worked in fintech for longer than I've been programming and had her mind blown this was possible at all.
Income inequality is not a money thing, it's a society thing. It's accessibility to knowledge: Education with extra bells and whistles.
Lowering barriers of education lowers income inequality. This is something AI achieves.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Adys Link ParentThis, by the way, is the #1 problem in AI and tech today - I am dead sure of this. I try to keep juniors in my team but I have literally no idea how to train them anymore. Where do you even start...This, by the way, is the #1 problem in AI and tech today - I am dead sure of this. I try to keep juniors in my team but I have literally no idea how to train them anymore. Where do you even start to learn the skills my fellow senior engineers learned over years of experience, when the path is basically dead and littered with bad examples?
Solving this is going to be serious business.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Adys Link ParentHow do you define productivity? I spent my life (23 years in engineering + various other fields) working on side projects. Some of them have led to startups. I professionalized my ADHD and turned...How do you define productivity?
I spent my life (23 years in engineering + various other fields) working on side projects. Some of them have led to startups. I professionalized my ADHD and turned it into a venture studio / AI lab.
I wrote a Hearthstone simulator and the next thing I knew, I was CTO of a video game data analytics startup. This is the stuff I used to do to "avoid being productive".
This little TUI game would not have existed because I would not have bothered, because my off-time is no longer being spent playing world of warcraft but rather dealing with a million other things life is throwing at me. I'm officially too busy to ever have side-projects worth starting.
So instead of spending some of that off time on a passive activity, I was able to spend it on a creative activity and produce something, which /would/ have taken me several weeks had I gotten past the starting step.
I'm flabbergasted people can look at these examples and still not Get It. What is it with that?
Just to illustrate the insanity of 1000x productivity, that means what you’d normally deliver in two years (assuming a forty hour work week) you deliver in four hours with AI.
A Tesla can accelerate "0 to 60 mph in as little as 2.1 seconds". To illustrate the insanity of that number, that means a Tesla can reach the speed of light in less than a year.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Adys Link ParentI have no desire to fight cement and I'd honestly rather keep both my steel and my sanity instead of trying to move people who wouldn't want to budge anyway. If I'm going to waste my breath...You fight cement with steel; if you really show the results and show beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is working, then cement will crumble.
I have no desire to fight cement and I'd honestly rather keep both my steel and my sanity instead of trying to move people who wouldn't want to budge anyway. If I'm going to waste my breath convincing someone who's dead-set on their position, I'd rather convince an american that trump is not as great as they thought or something - at least that'd achieve some good if I succeed.
Of course, this is all speculative
But it's not... people are speculating on future while ignoring the present. AI is helping in clear-cut-good areas such as drug discovery (and yes, that includes new-generation GenAI), it's helping students learn languages, it's helping create more free and open source tooling...
And all those chuffing at, for example, AI replacing consultants "as if that has real-world value"? Consultant $$$ consume a ton of tax money on public projects. The cost of creation being brought down means money being used for more useful purposes than lining these same pockets. And while I'm sure the efficiency of the conversion won't be perfect, it'll be a hell of a lot better than before.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Adys Link ParentYeah it's definitely a learning curve to get it to behave well in large codebases but it's possible! I'm actually going to be speaking at a couple of meetups and webinars on that exact subject....But it's often a slog to use it in a large codebase and can get confused easily. I have it document it's plans and actions and will constantly use those documents to refresh it's context and even still it's constantly getting things wrong in large refactors. It speeds you up, but also slows you down in a way.
Yeah it's definitely a learning curve to get it to behave well in large codebases but it's possible! I'm actually going to be speaking at a couple of meetups and webinars on that exact subject. Basically: guardrails (in the form of strict type checking and linters), indexed and well-structured documentation, extreme consistency, strong abstraction layers. All things which overall improve the health of a codebase. All things which Claude can generate itself :)
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Adys Link ParentIt’s impossible to argue against a cemented position.It’s impossible to argue against a cemented position.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Adys Link ParentThen call me the unicorn factory because I have reproduced this experience several times :) Here's another product, with even a business model, that was built in the space of around 30 minutes:...Which does make it impressive, but also makes this a bit of a unicorn, as it is unusually well documented in public materials.
Then call me the unicorn factory because I have reproduced this experience several times :)
Here's another product, with even a business model, that was built in the space of around 30 minutes: https://nacebel.codes
Most of that time was spent on deployment actually, since it's one of our earlier AI-generated works. And purchasing the domain while inferencing.
We build scrapers, linters, databases and APIs where before, starting the work was even unthinkable because it would be a fool's errand.
Anyway I hear ya. I haven't categorized or placed you in anything, no; I don't have any interest in labeling people (unless they're in my datasets) -- I'm really just here to share amazement and experience! it's only half-rant, half "message in a bottle", sorry if this was unclear.
POV - I was on Tildes when chatgpt had just come out, showcasing how powerful the language models were, and arguing over the potential of the whole thing. At some point I stopped really arguing on the internet and just ended up focusing on doing meaningful shit with all this tech. We're living in an incredible stepping stone of civilization… we can either get busy doing something with it, or do what the other half of HN does and be a pedant over whether hallucinations should be called confabulations, and whether Real Programmers should never use AI. Too many times in my life did I choose the latter… not this time, heh.
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
Adys Link ParentYou're reading a lot in my post that isn't there, such as the fact I'm surprised by any of this. I am not… in fact I pretty explicitly said in my post: Key word being "of course". Yes, it's not...You're reading a lot in my post that isn't there, such as the fact I'm surprised by any of this. I am not… in fact I pretty explicitly said in my post:
With such massively different experiences possible, and incredibly broad labels, of course the discussion on "AI" is all over the place. [...] Because it's such a mess I see naysayers who can only see those negatives and who are convinced AI is a bubble ...
Key word being "of course". Yes, it's not surprising. Again - opinion piece, no blame being assigned anywhere; I'm very matter-of-fact about life.
And yes I only responded to one part of your post because I was on my phone and could only give a few minutes of my time to that response :)
But I do see this .. i think very defensive attitude towards the "1000x" number. It's a scary number because it has a ton of implications in terms of job security, society, everything. I guess it's normal to be defensive over it and want to contradict it by saying "Yeah but it's not 1000x all the time" -- thing is, nobody said it was. What I said is that it's possible to extract this, and doing so creates opportunities that did not exist before. Because it's not like I wrote that little game 1000x faster than my "competition" -- it's that, because I could write it 1000x faster, I just did it, whereas months ago, I never would have done it. Now it exists, where before it never would have.
It's not "work time" that was replaced - it's 5 min watching a chill youtube video or something.
For the records, here were the prompts, verbatim (yup):
new project - download https://github.com/Eyefyre/NYT-Connections-Answers (you can use git) then look at the structure of the data.json file, then make me a TUI to play the NYT connections game using that data. Make it good & fast and do it in whatever language makes sense i guess python? actually ok fine do it in go. or not, I mean, you do whatever you want.
arrow keys and enter key dont work also make it look better pls cause it looks like ass, use bubbletea
after a successful submission you need to reorient the board, so that the submission goes on the topmost available line like in the connecting wall / original puzzle. also uh make it cuter
have it automatically download and cache the data from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Eyefyre/NYT-Connections-Answers/refs/heads/main/connections.json - cache should last a maximum of 12 hours
and .. that was it. Not much in the way of speccing, was there? :) Yeah, it's fucking insane.
Huh, I was going to say "nah, violation is continuous" but a read of that article actually says there is absolutely grounds for time-barring the suit. Wow, that's kinda nuts.