I don't think we're at a point yet where anyone would trust ZLUDA enough to ship commercial products that rely on it. I would be delighted though, if anyone can prove me wrong.
I know what SPICE is, but for anyone not knowing it, the first SPICE text is also a hyperlink. Clicking it brings the clicker to the homepage instantly.
This is how it should be done: Hyperlinking pages to prevent information duplication and inconsistencies, using libraries to not rewrite every piece of code when it's required.
It passes the sniff test, and a low-color palette of a pony reading a Red Hat checks out pretty nicely.
Maybe we should entertain ourselves sometimes. I don't care about people's choices as long as it's universally unethical or offending or... you get the idea.
Edit: BTW, That pony is the user's general avatar, it seems. Fun.
I mean, none of the frontier labs are beacons of ethics and collective progress. They all want to corner "the market" and pump the riches to their own pockets.
The discourse is a result of their behavior. Not the opposite.
Exactly. People are expecting wode eyed optimism in response to some of the most cutthroat and cynical behavior from the leaders of the AI firms. Its crazy. They're making their bed but they dont want to lie in it
People are expecting you to consider the possibility that they might believe what they're saying. If you don't start from the premise that they're lying, you'll discover that their behavior is not cutthroat or cynical at all, and the behavior that appears to be is instead an inevitable consequence of things that they knew would happen and warned the public about years ago.
Given the track record of corporate America, to take these folks at their word would be monumentally stupid. “Lying to get their way” is practically the M.O. for corporate America and now, on this topic, we’re expected to take it seriously? For real?
You're expected to take it seriously because a number of their previous predictions about where the technology would go have ended up being correct. A lot of problems AI systems are already causing would be in a much better spot had people listened to Sam Altman's warnings in 2019, instead of making fun of him for the idea that text generation could possibly be dangerous.
In early 2019 OpenAI released a post titled "Better language models and their implications" (https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/). In this post, they explained that their new GPT-2 model shows broad capabilities across a wide range of tasks, why this should be worrying to the public and to policymakers, and how this led to their decision not to release it widely. In particular, they said:
* This kind of decision is similar to the norms in biotechnology and cybersecurity, where AI misuse may soon become relevant.
* They understand that some people have the technical capacity to build and publish similar systems, but they hope the AI community will be careful about doing so.
* Governments should start tracking the impact, adoption, and progression of AI capabilities.
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By 2023, the problems had become a blaring alarm bell at OpenAI, and they started posting papers like https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03718 demanding that the government must regulate AI quickly because of the dangerous capabilities that will soon start appearing. (They also signed the famous "Pause AI" letter, although there's truth to the criticism that using the frontier model they'd literally just released as the benchmark for a 6 month pause is kinda silly.)
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Now we're in 2026, those dangerous capabilities have clearly arrived, and we don't have the regulations to deal with them because nobody listened to the warnings. You say Timnit Gebru warned us, but her warnings were about a very different topic, because she insisted and to this day continues to insist that AI systems do not actually have dangerous capabilities. In her view, it's categorically impossible for any LLM-based system to be dangerous, except in the sense that human beings could intentionally use it to commit political sins. Her response to the guy who resigned from Anthropic last week (https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:azpq3hfq3llpowyqpjkqwgxs/po...) was that his concerns are obviously stupid and people only think otherwise because they're racist.
Perhaps, but that is no excuse. Rampant and unconstrained cynicism is toxic and self-destructive. Like a child that starts smashing their toys, hoping someone will take pity on them.
Guys like Paul Graham are a rare breed, a Hobbit-like optimist living in the equivalent of Mordor. When the political headwinds are strong, that type of hopecore content finds the right people and motivates legitimate change. If we still lived in 2009, then yeah, this would be a bizarre reaction to a national-scale business saying that we need to organize for a greater purpose.
But two decades have passed. I'm not going to enumerate everything that happened, but the US lost a lot of international standing in that time. We saw unprecedented protectionism, app store censorship, crypto/NFT celebrity scams, national-scale bribery, American annexation threats against NATO members; 10 years ago this would all be called parody by HN. We all watched neoliberalism get the Gallagher watermelon treatment.
This HN is the older and callous one. It's not a comfortable status-quo, but blaming the skepticism reveals a shocking blindness on many people's behalf. The problems with Anthropic and OpenAI today isn't the possibility of RSI, it's their political commitment to corruption, lies, hysteria and debt. The closed-door research only exists to impose an artificial authority that wouldn't exist if oversight committees and responsible disclosure was enforced by a trustworthy government. None of that is "cynical" to highlight, it's an objective development in America's national AI story.
Im less concerned about hn change and more about society and the public I have to coexist with. People use cynicism as a tool to avoid thinking or engage with reality.
It is just reactionary snark, and everyone nodds along. It isnt a position or analysis. Nobody even cares if it is accurate because the vibe is what matters. Nothing constructive comes of it and everyone is digging their own intellectual graves.
Mathematics sits in a very different place w.r.t. other sciences. First of all, it's very meta. Yes, it can describe any phenomenon on our planet. On the other hand, advanced mathematics is a high mountain which is very hard to climb, and changes the climber in various and irreversible ways once the journey begins.
That's said, I'm a non-mathematician, but a computer scientist. Mathematics was always my weak part, because solving problems which doesn't mean anything doesn't motivate me, and when I'm not motivated, I fail.
Without digressing so much, I want to say that, some of the things in mathematics and mathematics adjacent sciences baffle me. Many mathematicians don't understand the proofs of others, yet they accept it since it checks out within the rules of mathematics. Moreover, many engineers don't understand the formulae they work with. I have developed a very performant Boundary Element Method evaluator, yet I don't know the reason of taking Gaussian Integrals over the surface. The only answer I got is "because the method works that way".
So, if computers can make the proofs now, and we have no curious students pecking their professors to understand how these works, the whole mathematics as a science could wither and die. Because besides it being a sport, it's the very language which can model and explain anything, but it's very hard to master and understand due to that nature.
Our professors warned us against using too much Mathematica, to make us learn things the hard way and make the knowledge permanent. Now, if we offload science to a matmul engine, it's possible that we lose the connection and never able to close the gap in some cases.
Again, it boils down to "This machine has no brain, use yours (or lose it)".
There was a hash collision bug in the main Lean kernel that was patched, but AFAIK nothing relied on it. You'd have to know what you were doing to accidentally get there...
I don't think the take is bad, and what he says is right. Maybe we shall look at the substance rather than the artistic properties of their words?
I was recently discussing with someone who wanted to put all datacenters into AI datacenter basket, and inadvertently labeled all consolidated computing bad. That person, claiming otherwise was not knowing what they were talking about,
But while having nuances, AI datacenters and heavy AI usage is harmful to the world we live in, as a whole. We should come into terms with this and go from there.
No, what he says is not right. Parts of it are, but broadly (as I pointed out) he conflates a lot of things together that have no business being in the same sentence.
1. Reducing/replacing/automating highly complex work is fundamentally a good thing, it might be the case that society is not ready for the consequences of it, those are two separate things. Concluding that millions of people will die, is simply hyperbole.
2. Saying that AI is not intelligent is at best a non-sequitur but more likely intended misrepresentation and goalpost moving
3. The environmental harm of AI, however significant, is ultimately public knowledge and 100% clear in the public discourse around the current implementation of AI. This says nothing about AI in the general sense, only how we produce it today. This is like preventing cars from becoming a thing because they produce CO2. Do you think the world would be better off if cars were never invented?
None of this is about the 'artistic properties of their words', it is precisely about the core content being objectionable.
> Reducing/replacing/automating highly complex work is fundamentally a good thing, it might be the case that society is not ready for the consequences of it, those are two separate things. Concluding that millions of people will die, is simply hyperbole.
I don't think saying that millions will die is a hyperbole. It might be communicated poorly, but having no ability to work in a world with worsening quality of life (via climate crisis and economic changes) is being pinched between a rock and a hard place. What these people gonna do? Photosynthesis? One of countries which is among the leaders of this technology believes that social governmental systems is communism. So, yeah, perfect.
> The environmental harm of AI, however significant, is ultimately public knowledge and 100% clear in the public discourse around the current implementation of AI.
Yet the people who own and hype this technology is applying the Tobacco/Soda Industry Playbook: Deny and publish studies saying otherwise.
This is not fair, because who has the gold, makes the rules to increase their profit even more.
> This is like preventing cars from becoming a thing because they produce CO2. Do you think the world would be better off without combustion engines?
My current stance is not undoing things to zero, however forcing AI development to be more environmentally conscious and start regulating its power and water use. This is possible by prescribing energy source mix ratios, closed loop water cooling, etc. etc.
Of course this will slow some progress and make it a bit more expensive for a while, but in the end it'll be way more environmentally friendly.
All discourse doesn't have to be on a duotone plane. We can discuss in a 3D space with infinitely more shades.
> but having no ability to work in a world with worsening quality of life
If unemployment leads to death, there are many more things wrong than just AI. Why get mad at AI instead of at capitalism. This is nonsensical.
> Tobacco/Soda Industry Playbook
Except both of those succeeded in destroying health for decades, whereas AI had like a 2 year run before all the datacenter madness came to light.
> My current stance is not undoing things to zero,
This does not at all answer my question, my question is about the past not the present. The author is arguing to resist AI, what if resisting cars had worked? This is my question.
Systems don't break instantly, but after many blows. There's already many more things are wrong. AI is a very potent accelerant in this case, not the sole problem.
> Why get mad at AI instead of at capitalism. This is nonsensical.
I'm not mad at AI, but how it's built, operated and for what end (i.e. capitalism). I believe I'm pretty consistent about this for quite some time (i.e. my comment history).
> whereas AI had like a 2 year run before all the datacenter madness came to light.
Being known is not a guaranteed precursor to change. It's one step closer to change, yes, but nothing is guaranteed because the supporting forces are too strong. We'll see how the discourse and reality will evolve. We're just starting.
> my question is about the past not the present. The author is arguing to resist AI, what if resisting cars had worked? This is my question.
My bad, misunderstood what you said. Maybe it didn't work in the distant past, but resisting cars in Paris worked, for example. Being adamant about Diesel cars' problems eradicated them from passenger sector and pushed them to the high-torque, special application, heavy haul niche.
Unfortunately, humans don't get motivated to make changes until they experience the proverbial near-death experience, and there's always suspicion about early alarmists, but at least maybe we can sow the seeds of awareness earlier this time and reduce the time to change, IDK.
But there's one thing I hate (and I don't use the word lightly): Being right early, being shot down by others with accusations of being stupid, and being right on the long run. This cycle is really wearing me down, and this is the third or fourth time I'm going through this about large world events.
You are providing nuance to the authors stance, my reaction is to the authors stance. I don't disagree with you but this is no longer about the actual content of the blog post.
> I have teammates who talk using Claude almost exclusively.
If somebody told that humans are a form of creature which can forego their most important and powerful capabilities just for convenience, I'd call the person saying that batshit insane, but here we are...
ZLUDA is already doing that, no?
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