I tried this last week and had the same experience. It was terrible and they got $140 out of me before I realized what it was (not) capable of. Their support was nonexistent as well.
All of these Gen AI tools where you pay a subscription fee are basically Software-as-a-Casino. You spin the wheel and hope it doesn't come up 00, then chase good money after bad when it does. Add in the parasocial relationship that some people develop with the LLM and you basically have OnlyFans but instead of vaguely dissatisfying feet pics to order it's vaguely dissatisfying code to order. It's that edge of "almost there, just one more token, bro" that makes it addictive.
That might be the right analogy except it is not clear that it is a house always wins situation.
If you have a .6 chance of success on any particular outcome. Long term win or loss is down to your behaviour. If you double or nothing every time loss is guaranteed. The right strategy will win over the long term.
Gambling addicts make all kinds of post-hoc rationalizations for why they are actually up, if you think about it. "Well, if you consider my entertainment, I'm actually up." "Well, if you think of all the drinks I got comped, I'm actually up." Even worse are the ones who talk about runs, "I was up $10,000 at one point." Nevermind they gave it all back and another $20k chasing that first $10k. At the end of the day, if they had just gone to the movies instead, they'd have more money on their pocket.
Same with most people "doing a startup" or "opening a restaurant". There will be arguments all day long about how these affairs are technically possible and quite lucrative if everything goes according to plan. But the reality is that vanishly few people are equipped to identify and stick to the right plan. Reality meeting theory.
I've told my developers they can use agentic coding if they want, but they must never mention it in the course of development. Not because I don't want to know, but because it's not going to change my evaluation of "their" work. If they can use the AI and get to a point that they can submit a PR that they themselves understand, then technically speaking, what do I care? But if it breaks the build or does something stupid and they don't understand it, it's going to be a bad day for them, whether they wrote it themselves or copied it out of StackOverflow or had Gemini do it.
Nobody has taken me up on this offer, because I think they know that they aren't going to have the extreme discipline to do the hard thing of understanding "someone" else's code and sign their name to it.
> Same with most people "doing a startup" or "opening a restaurant".
While I mostly agree with your sentiment, I think there is an important difference. Unless you are attempting advantage play (99.99% of gamblers are not, and casinos ban the few that are), there is literally nothing you can do at a casino to make it a positive EV activity. No amount of skill, drive, effort, or anything other than pure luck can consistently generate profit at a casino.
A startup/business, on the other hand, can be effectived by your actions. Luck obviously plays a large factor, but you have some level of control over the outcome.
I don't think it really matters all that much if the restaurant's success can be attributable to skill at a 2% or 4% rate or whatever. For all practical purposes, since you only get one or two shots at doing that kind of thing in a lifetime, your chances are practically 0. You don't have the infinite resources to make 5% all-or-nothing return work. Focusing on the math aspect is ignoring that people are not mathematical creatures. The math is not used to analyze, it's used to justify, to construct a story that folks then use to delude themselves into believing. I can be a great poker player. I can run tight margins to make a restaurant work. I can use cocaine and not get addicted. I'm special.
> If they can use the AI and get to a point that they can submit a PR that they themselves understand, then technically speaking, what do I care?
This is where my employer has ended up after extremely cautious AI adoption: _must_ be reviewed by a human, and the human whose name is on the gerrit review is responsible for the quality of the work.
For some reason the OpenAI dashboard shows me how much money the company as a whole has spent? It's still a very reasonable-looking amount of money and a tiny fraction of salaries.
I am actually up all the drinks I got comped in Vegas. I sit down at the penny slots and bet one penny one row until I get offered a free drink. I tip the server $3, bet two more pennies for good measure, get up, and walk out with the drink in my hand. I just got like a $3.10 Manhattan for walking around the strip, including tip, courtesy of some business that was low-key trying to scam me and deserves to have less money than they do.
I worked in the bar business and know what a shot of rail bourbon costs with a volume discount, and the ten cents they get from the slot machine definitely does not cover it. I’m happy to give the server $3 for their effort.
They’re obviously doing it because it’s profitable. If they were being genuinely altruistic, I’d be much less likely to take advantage of it.
> Nobody has taken me up on this offer, because I think they know that they aren't going to have the extreme discipline to do the hard thing of understanding "someone" else's code and sign their name to it.
That seems lazy to me. "I'm not willing to see if I can do a better job by using this tool, because I don't want to bother analyzing it's work".
If they cannot mention it how do you know that they have not taken up the offer?
I agree that people will rationalise being in a losing situation as a winning situation. That does not change the fact that winning situations can exist.
I very much doubt they are thinking that deep. I think you're bending over backwards to give the AI an out based off of an incomplete picture. You can't have a complete picture because you haven't been here in this project.
Back two years ago, a lot of them were playing with AI code gen. They also have some explicit tasking for using agentic AI tooling to evaluate for use in an analytics product we're building, so it's not like they don't even have access or permission or time to try. We're just not religious converts who think AI would one day replace humanity and we should be working to help it.
Through the lens of "don't ask don't tell", throughout all of this, I've not seen any significant change in work output. The folks that have used AI for the specific research tasks they had did not produce solutions faster than without it. They spent huge amounts of time on things like getting the AI to produce results that have any meaning beyond what was trivially reportable in the data already, reliably reproduce the same results, even reliably operate over the full dataset. It's not been the go-fast button everyone has said it would be. I think folks are optimizing for reducing their cognitive workload: it's easier to understand, modify, and live with code you wrote yourself.
>I very much doubt they are thinking that deep. I think you're bending over backwards to give the AI an out based off of an incomplete picture. You can't have a complete picture because you haven't been here in this project.
This is a principle that could apply to any property that may be beneficial but also might be detrimental. That is why the gambling analogy applies.
This is about who carrys the risk for choices, regardless of if it is about using AI or something else.
I find this language fascinating. On one hand, the Department of "War" gives the department an underlying, unspoken goal that it should be involved in war with something. On the other hand, it's very easy to fund the Department of "Defense;" of course we need more money to defend our country. Don't we want to be safe! It's much less attractive to fund the Department of "War"
He's now on X bashing Anthropic for taking this same stance. I know this would be expected of him, but many other Google AI researchers signed this as well as Google Deep Mind the organization. We really need to push to keep humans in the kill decision loop. Google, OpenAI, and X-AI are are all just agreeing with the Pentagon.
Also, MicroVision, the company in OP's article bought the IP from Luminar. This feels like a circular venture capital scam. Luminar originally went public via SPAC and made a bunch of people very wealthy before ultimately failing.
If the goal is to make US goods attractive to other countries and to decrease our trade deficit (not saying I agree with this goal), either the dollar has to become fundamentally weaker or the goods have to become more valuable. The latter feels more difficult than the former at this point. However, the side effects of a weaker dollar may not be worth weakening it.
> decrease our trade deficit (not saying I agree with this goal), either the dollar
A direct link exists between a nation's status as the world's primary reserve currency and its tendency to run persistent trade deficits.
This relationship is often described by the Triffin Dilemma, a paradox where the global demand for the reserve currency necessitates that the issuing country consistently supplies the world with its currency, primarily through importing more than it exports.
The flip side is if you weaken the dollar by appearing unstable and displaying hostility to your main trade partners, you get the drawbacks of the weaker currency (reduced purchasing power) without commensurate improvement in the attractiveness of goods to other countries. Some devaluations are more strategic than others.
But the broligarchs don't need purchasing power. All their wealth is in assets, leveraged many times over. Currency collapse is the best that can happen to them.
This is the most important comment here. The US rebuilt nations' economies after World War II by printing dollars and buying goods from those countries. In return, the dollar became the world reserve currency and did not suffer massive inflation despite printing so much of it. It's a supply and demand thing, just like any good or service. There was a ton of demand for the dollar, so printing more (increasing supply) did not crash the "price" of the dollar (inflation is the price/value of the dollar decreasing). We printed a ton of dollars during covid but it didn't result in hyperinflation like what happens with, say, Iran or South American currencies because the demand for dollars was still so very high.
It depends on how this happens. Labor would still be more expensive here than developing economies. We could easily just end up with a weaker dollar and floundering manufacturing, which means more inflation.
Every country has rare earth elements. Just google "X discovers rare earth" where X is your country of choice and you'll find articles about how they have huge deposits. The underlying problem is the processing. China has figured this out and has cornered the market. Until other countries figure out how to process these materials, China will be able to leverage this capability to their advantage.
Not every country has economically extractable heavy rare earths, resource =/= reserve. X discovers rare earth is the same as X discovers plants, and then assume every country can build a robust biofuel economy. Reminder PRC has the MOST shale deposits in the world, they're just buried very deep and economically AND technically not productive to extract at scale.
PRC's main choke hold is HeavyREE, more specifically processing of ionic clays that is GEOGRAPHICALLY SCARCE like economically extractable oil deposits, which enables economic leeching of heavy strategic rare earth AT SCALE. Think hunting whales for blubber vs drilling oil, supports entirely different tiers of proliferation and use. At scale is key, west never used HREEs at scale until PRC commoditized them by exploiting specific geology mostly limited to south PRC, Myanmar, parts of Brazil but deposits now also found in Australia because Australia has everything. So the real question is can long will it take AU+co to discover and build the entire HREE infra based on deposit types only PRC has real experience with.
It's have nothing to do with "figuring it out". Both mining and processing been figured out decades ago. But rare earth mining is disaster for ecology and western countries just don't want to pay the tall and deal with political consequences. Countries like China and Russia have advantage the they can do whatever they want without caring about protests or long term effects on population of regions where mining occurs.
There quite few talks on the topic, but you can check this one by Dr. Julie Klinger of University of Delaware:
I view my phone primarily as something I'm obligated to carry on myself at all times to function in modern society. The easier it is to carry the better. When I need to upgrade my phone, I'll always choose the smallest iPhone by weight.
Same. There are really only two features I care about in a phone: a high refresh rates and weight. At 165 grams the iPhone air is by far the lightest 120hz phone apple has ever made. Second place is the iPhone 15 Pro at 187 grams. Getting ready to ditch my 15 pro.
Me too, and I’m planning the same upgrade. Always wanted to downsize but 60Hz was a deal breaker for me. Been using 120-144Hz+ displays exclusively since the VG248QE in 2013.
I was quite surprised to see this entire thread full of HN users who apparently want some brick phone to doom scroll lying flat on a table all day until the battery dies.
Right, thinness doesn't help with anything. I want smaller width and height (i.e., a iPhone 17 mini) so that the phone will fit better in my jeans pocket.
I'm not sure about this. I think that if the weight balance is weird (esp. in the heavy top light bottom scenario - I sincerely hope it's not a thing with this new iPhone), it'll act as a lever and put more strain on your fingers to hold the phone.
Not sure you'd like the weight. All the major phone makers have consumer research saying they've reached the limits of weight comfort and many makers are working hard to pull back from those limits.
HN is mostly male. We need the opinion of the women that put a lot of effort into their appearance. Not wishing to over-generalise, but they need a thin phone that takes awesome selfies and shows that they are higher status than those with old fashioned bulky phones. Apple have ticked the boxes and they have probably booked out all the prime advertising spots to reach this demographic.
I just wanted to highlight that he was also an entrepreneurship professor at NC State and shaped many students' views of what they could do with their lives.
I was one of those students. I now own my own company as a result of his teachings. He was very influential and a wonderful human being. This news is tragic.
Marshall Brain's contributions to the entrepreneurship program more broadly were extremely significant. I never had him as a professor, but his influence on the program was clear, even to me.
