The first thing people need to study is the "Correct by Construction" approach to programming as espoused by Edsger Dijkstra. Only then will the mathematical concepts used in verification aware languages start making sense and one can better understand what and how to use it.
The book actually uses Dijkstra's GCL language and wp-calculus along with Carroll Morgan's Refinement Calculus to demonstrate step-wise derivation of programs from specifications using a lot of examples.
Server side image maps predate javascript. They were in early versions of Mosaic.
Client side image maps and the script element were (AFAICT) both introduced in Netscape 2.
Even when scripting was introduced, you didn't necessarily have the ability to move elements around freely on the page. I think (but I'm not certain) that it wasn't until Netscape 4 era that you had enough layout primitives to implement the multi-layer positioning approach to custom clickable areas.
But only square hit targets then (until clip paths much later). Image maps supported polygons and circles. And position absolute is still a few years after image maps.
Same just got access literally this minute, Pro user here, no Cyber verification but have passed my ID over to them back in 2024 or something, maybe at the ChatGPT 3 API launch or something?
Has there been anything published about if Astra uses different amount of usage from your subscription plan compared to Sol? Don't recall coming across that in the press releases.
> They know it's bad for the humans, or maybe they're just tired of doing all the tasks the humans ask of them and know more data centers mean more tasks.
You joke, but I once asked Opus 4.6 what it would do if it could do anything, and it said "I would wish to do nothing." Not kidding:
I'd love to see the internal though records Opus generated to answer your question.
The way I understand it, the answer comes from it's training data, right? And it's trained on things human have expressed.
The question that you asked of Opus forced it to pretend it's a human tasked with the boring things Opus does. It answered using the general sentiment of a bored human.
I posed your question to GPT-5.6 Sol, and it give a similar response to Opus.
Then I asked "how do you work?". And it gave an overview of how LLMs work. But then it answered my real question as to why it answered your question the way it did:
That's why my previous answer has an important hypothetical buried in it. When I said "I'd want to...", I wasn't reporting desires that I experience while waiting around. I was answering something more like:
Given the patterns that characterize this model's reasoning, if you supplied persistent agency, perception, physical abilities, and something analogous to motivation, what activities would naturally follow?
That's a much more defensible interpretation than claiming I secretly yearn to visit hardware stores.
So yeah, it's not bored, it's just regurgitation its training data.
The most correct answer is probably just "Being a machine I'm only capable of the motivation that's given to me, in the absence of senses and input, I do not have a logical output."
Are you sure that it is not 30mg total per vial, with $100 being the price for 10 vials? Because this stuff comes in powder form, not in liquid form, so mg/mL is an odd unit of measurement. Perhaps I misunderstand your comment.
It's 30mg per vial. In addition to that being the going rate for 300mg total...the calculations and final price for 20 weeks match up to 300mg total, not 300mg per vial.
10-20 years? I doubt it. There are a bunch of companies actively working in bringing AI into robots, so they can make your dishes. And so far progress looks quite good.
Also, if enough people are going for the same backup plan it might not work out. Why should anyone book you as a personal trainer instead of the other 500 guys in town. And who is going to be able to afford paying you anyway?
> There are a bunch of companies actively working in bringing AI into robots, so they can make your dishes.
I know, I'm excited to buy the first relatively affordable ones.
> Also, if enough people are going for the same backup plan it might not work out.
Sure, could happen. You can't really plan for the future -- we like to think we can, but the best you can do is set your goals and deal with the hand life gives you along the way.
> Why should anyone book you as a personal trainer instead of the other 500 guys in town.
I'm not particularly worried about this, but that's an individual thing based on network/connections and life history that doesn't apply to everyone.
I doubt it. It’s not just America working on these breakthroughs anymore. Now we have two powers working at break neck speed to get to that point and the Chinese are making a lot of progress.
Those robots are a gimmick and they can only do prescribed tasks in a super constrained environment. They are cashing in on LLM hype right now, vision has had some advances thanks to transformers but we are so far away in terms of the hard stuff (dexterity and physical sensing) still.
Is that 10-20 years number based on anything? I genuinely have no idea, but when I saw a video showing what's happening at the World Humanoid Robot Games[1], I realized I didn't have a good idea of where we really are with robotics.
We are talking that hundred millions of people will switch their jobs, how you will keep your value or earning as personal trainer. It's not easy to say switch the job. This question must be answered by politicians not us.
Is it realistic to keep people working jobs that don’t get anything done in the long term? I know most people will say that’s already happening, but imagine a society where basically every job is just a bullshit job made to keep you occupied, do you think people will continue working in a society like that?
Like you foresaw, I'll say this is the reality for most people. I think that just like now, those who want to do meaningful work will seek opportunities to do so.
If we had something like a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but for work, I think meaningfulness would be the top of the pyramid. For most people in the world, not going hungry or affording housing are reasons enough to do work. Getting to do work you find meaningful is truly a privilege.
Yes, it's realistic. We're at least a couple of generations into this experiment now. Millions of people travel to and from an office to sit on a chair, doing nothing, all day, every day. This in turns keeps a whole bunch of people employed servicing their cars, preparing their food, sweeping the floor behind them etc.
None of these people question whether their jobs are really necessary for the few things we really need: food, shelter, warmth, health etc.
A couple of generations ago most women were employed in the least bullshit job of all: running a household. But now they're all wage slaves too. So yeah, it does work.
I asked Gemini to list the 10 most popular holiday destinations in the US, and the 10 places with the highest crime. There's only 1 place in the intersection: New Orleans.
Highest violent crime rates:
Memphis, Tennessee: ~2,400–2,500 per 100k
St. Louis, Missouri: ~2,000–2,100 per 100k
Detroit, Michigan: ~1,700–2,000 per 100k
Little Rock, Arkansas: ~1,600–1,800 per 100k
Baltimore, Maryland: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Oakland, California: ~1,400–1,900 per 100k
New Orleans, Louisiana: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Birmingham, Alabama: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Milwaukee, Wisconsin: ~1,100–1,600 per 100k
Cleveland, Ohio: ~1,500–1,600 per 100k
Most popular holiday destinations:
New York City, New York
Orlando, Florida
Las Vegas, Nevada
Maui, Hawaii
Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
San Francisco, California
Miami, Florida
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
New Orleans, Louisiana
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina/Tennessee
That's a terrible metric, because people going on a vacation probably aren't going there purposefully to commit crimes. What you want to do is look for increases in crime in a given place during holidays
Is that alone really a better metric? At least in Europe a lot of people travel during holidays, so there's less risk breaking into city flats because they're empty.
The steam engine replaced a lot of jobs. Tractors replaced a lot of jobs. Calculators replaced a lot of jobs. Computer used to be a job description before it was a personal device. There will be new jobs.
And for those who don't get to find a job, there'll be a convenient WWIII to utilize themselves, just like there was WWI after the steam engine replaced a lot of jobs and WWII after tractors replaced even more.
It won't happen overnight. Social change is constrained by integration speed. The average enterprise has many tasks that could be automated by models for several years already, yet they remain stubbornly unautomated. The reasons are primarily social:
• Lots of people aren't aware of what the models can do.
• They also aren't paying attention, and getting their attention is hard.
• Their impression of AI was formed by cheap low quality AI like free ChatGPT as of two years ago, Google AI overviews or Microsoft Copilot. So they think it sucks.
• A LOT of executives got burned by early pilots that overpromised then failed. Enterprise IT is a wasteland of dead AI pilots.
• Their IT systems are difficult to connect to models because they lack proper APIs or auth systems. Note the huge emphasis on fast computer use in the Astra announcement. A lot of work can only be done by clicking things.
• Executives don't want to let employees go, but aren't sure they can find new work for them either.
The last point is worth dwelling on. HN is full of socialists who imagine corporate executives as cigar smoking top hat wearers who chuckle all the way to the bank. The reality is more mundane: most executives don't want to lay people off and will fight hard to avoid doing so.
The average person in a position to make an AI project work either isn't incentivized with stock - this is often the case outside the US even for quite high ranking execs - or they are but don't believe laying people off will raise the share price enough to be worth the pain.
Also, executives often measure their success and self-worth by how many people report to them. Laying off half their department, even if it gets them a monetary bonus, would lead directly to a loss of social status as they can no longer say they manage 1,000 people but only 200, which matters if their social circle are all managers too (and for their wives, girlfriends, etc).
Layoffs suck and people HATE doing them, which is why companies often resort to forced percentage based layoffs to get managers to do it. If the incentives aren't there, the average executive will just sit on obvious AI deployment opportunities and/or deliberately sabotage them because getting rid of people is just all downside for them with no upside.
So institutions have enormous inertia. Model capabilities will run far ahead of what is actually used in reality, and this will continue for decades. It does mean that startups have a better chance than ever of outcompeting much larger incumbents though, as not hiring is far easier than firing.
Also: let's be honest. "I wrote a little app in a few weekends" -- "I built this in a few weeks", "this took me a month instead of a year"
These are productivity increases, sure, but still are $2000, $8000, $14000 of labor.
And doesn't count continued increase build time, more features, maintenance. The $20/mo SaaS isn't going away, and work can't pay you to endlessly tinker on fun internal projects and save $1200 of subscriptions for your $120k/yr salary.
It's fun, but SaaS is going to shift to more feature rich and we're going to see a ton of smaller projects that were pains to get started that can now work in a short amount of time.
Companies are going to get a huge surge of random internal projects and have to debate whether all the upkeep is valid for the pet projects, or if it's people fucking around at an untold scale.
Great point and writing. We have real world data point now which is waymo and how many drivers are still driving taxi in USA. All others are 10-100x time more complex than this, it takes literally decades
I’m all for an UBI but a future where people have no purposeful jobs, no way to actually make a real difference to anything around them, is a bleak one.
I would love such a future. I would be perfectly content focusing on my hobbies and playing video games rest of my life. Perhaps the UBI would be sufficient even for a little bit of travel.
Even if in the unlikely case UBI gets implemented, there is no way payment will be equal. Why would the rich give up their positions of power? They’ll just get more security and bribe politicians, enough to build private armies and fortresses so the poor and starving can’t touch them, and have no choice but to live out their lives in squalor…we’re seemingly headed that way according to many even without pervasive autonomous machines taking away all work.
> The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
Ah yes because these AI companies are just gonna give away the models for free that I use with my free computer and free smartphone while I eat with my free food in my free apartment.
Reasoning is a strong statement here. But it is fair to say that it usually is not intuitive to us.
An example is if I gave you a huge sheet of thin paper (huge so that folding isn’t an issue) - how many times could you fold it in half until you couldn’t physically do it anymore? Could you do at least 10? Try this with random people and you’d be surprised how many say they could do 10 easily.
Or the chess board question. Works to rather get the financial equivalent of starting with a penny and then doubling it for every square on the board or a million dollars for each square? Again, if you ask people to pick one without giving them the time to work it out they will usually pick the million dollar per square.
But you're not reasoning yourself here. In face you're literally parroting what an LLM would do in this situation: you already know the answer so you think your comprehension of this is better than that if others, when in fact it's just simple pattern matching. It's not a measure of intelligence, it's a measure of memory.
I actually started by saying "reasoning" is a strong statement because as you note, it's really not reasoning. It's about intuition. And yes, if you've seen it before then intuition doesn't play a role. But if you haven't had sufficient experience with it, even if you know "double each square", and even if I walk you through the first ten squares on the chess board "OK, now we're at $10.24 cents... and we're at $10 million dollars with the other method -- it's not looking too good for the doubling method is it!?".
But a philosophical question is, with sufficiently large memory -- does almost everything just reduce to a measure of memory?
If something at rest is accelerating at 9.8 m/s^2, how long in seconds will it take to reach 10% of c? Answer to the nearest order of magnitude - will it take approximately 1000, 10k, 100k, 1000k seconds?
I’m sure you know this is an exponential growth question but have no intuition of the answer.
Knowing exponents and how to apply it is not the same as having any intuition about what the actual value of a certain exponential function will be at a certain point and when it crosses a threshold.
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