Oh no, how dare a company try and invest R&D into a diversified portfolio of propulsion technologies. I'm sure HN has all the right ideas, just like they had the right idea when Starship was almost sure to beat SLS to orbit and full IOC a decade before Artemis II. I'm sure Morizo is crying after winning his latest gentleman drivers' race and wiping all his tears away with his paper yen.
It is genuinely insane how divorced SV is from actual people and reality.
I'm old enough to remember when people said 'Falcon Heavy is fake', 'SLS' is real. After that they shifted to 'Starship is fake' SLS is real.
And that SLS launched first isn't surprising it started to get 2 billion $ a year funding long before SpaceX had any money to invest in such projects.
And what matters for a rocket isn't 'first to orbit' that's only how idiots compare rockets. What matters is first 10 or even 100 flights.
And as for R&D, fine do R&D, but you still have to produce what actually sells. The simple fact is, hydrogen cars, either fuel cell or ICE are rounding errors. They have been rounding errors for decades and have made essentially no progress despite 50+ years of continuous government funding and R&D.
They are not just doing R&D, they have literally spend marketing money demonizing EVs. They have encouraged and leaned in to all government lead efforts to delay the EV industry. They have lobbied for regressive legislation. To act as if 'all they do is some nice R&D' is pathetic.
Toyota has not done like Tesla and invested in infrastructure, like hydrogen fuel stations. Because they know this is delusional and will never happen. Their hope has always been that government is going to build all the infrastructure for them, and pay for their R&D. They have been grifting government R&D money for literal decades. Even while with just a fraction of that money the EV industry was established. They have been lobbying Japans government for decades and have used that to prevent more beneficial R&D and infrastructure investment.
And Toyota is barley even selling these 'diversified portfolios'. Go and actually try to buy a hydrogen ICE or hydrogen fuel cell cars. In literally 99.9% of the world you can't buy them.
Hydrogen is a pipe-dream propped up by government budgets and anybody that believed in its wide deployment in 2000 was a moron, anybody that still believes in it in 2027 is straight up delusional.
So if anybody is divorced from reality its you.
The writing is on the wall. They lost. No amount of whining from SV people who don't go outside, who do not live in the real world, and who are high on their own supply of agents and harnesses who vibe-code all day in their small EA/rationalist bubbles and produce very little of actual economic value for normal people and who are so arrogant they are attempting to impose their dystopian will upon people will change this.
Investors are not rationalists or effective altruists. They chase the money. If the fundamentals and DD does not math to allow data centers to be profitable, and governments honor the people's will, they will jump ship and quicker than you think. And if governments do not honor the people's will (which is firmly in opposition to the odious people behind this push) then we have far bigger problems to worry about.
> And if governments do not honor the people's will... then we have far bigger problems to worry about.
Oh, yeah, sure. They'll get right on that. Patriot act is going away any day now. Climate change and healthcare and judicial / law enforcement reform going to be addressed any second.
The tears shed by the antisocial weirdos on this website if that happens will be enough to quench the thirst of the entire country after being run through a desalination plant. Good.
Definitely part of the issue (and the vast majority of people who ignore it because they're too PC to call it out are as well) however it's a small piece of the total pie. There are other bigger economic choices that are worse and causing more immediate harm
I want to be clear: I hate this. I hate everything about it. HOWEVER...
If you want to argue against wetware then we need a better argument than this. The same ideas were used to argue against stem cell research, IVF, and many other treatments and ideas that have saved and helped lives. Unit 731 isn't an apt comparison because cells are not inherently sentient to our knowledge. If they were it would absolutely shatter the profession of medical ethics as we know it.
I honestly don't know if better arguments are needed. I think most people simply have no idea that this research is happening right now, and if they did the vast majority would be against it. Feels fundamentally different from stem cell or IVF.
We know that human brain cells in sufficiently large and complex assemblages are sentient (I don't know if the word "inherently" has any purpose here). We know this research aims at making the assemblages larger and more complex. It's a fundamentally different kind of argument IMO compared to those against e.g. stem cells or IVF.
(Slight aside but did you know that they're also doing tests on whole human brains taken from corpses, and they give them tranquilizers "just to be sure"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212992)
> We know that human brain cells in sufficiently large and complex assemblages are sentient
No, we know that human brain cells in specific configurations honed by billions of years of evolution and in specific states are sentient. (The same collection of cells in a slightly different state or a different arrangement might be permanently comatose).
This argument is no different in kind than the claim that Mamdani and El-Sayed are terrorists: it's a fallacy of affirmation of the consequent.
Sure (it was a mistake to say "sufficiently complex" without qualification, obviously only certain very specific complex assemblages will actually be conscious). But if you think the "honed by billions of years of evolution" thing is relevant (on which I agree with you), you also have to acknowledge that the same goes for the neurons themselves. And not just the neurons in isolation, but also their capacity for self-organizing into computationally useful structures, possibly in response to certain stimuli, which you can be sure this type of research will try to take advantage of.
How do you know your fingernails aren't sentient? Better stop clipping them immediately!
> i want to know about proof
The epistemology of empirical science is inference to the best explanation, not proof. As pointed out by Hume centuries ago, no empirical generalization can be proven.
> The same ideas were used to argue against stem cell research, IVF, and many other treatments and ideas that have saved and helped lives.
You write as if objections to (certain kinds of) stem cell research, IVF, etc. have been roundly defeated in some way simply because they've "saved and helped lives". This is naked utilitarianism and I hope I don't have to rehearse the reasons why utilitarianism fails utterly as moral theory.
> Why does everyone value themselves based on their economic output?
I mean this is really the issue with the idea of AI taking jobs, isn't it? If our entire economic system wasn't predicated on this, nobody would be really that miffed about AI use in art because there wouldn't be much of a market for it, because the concept of art as being a marketable widget wouldn't exist in the first place, and the notion of human expression being replaced with a machine would be absurd. But we have tied up art with economic exchange for centuries. It has been a market commodity for almost as long as recorded human history. So the graphic designer who pours their creative spirit into what is, essentially, an economic exchange (rather than going and painting landscapes or something) feels an acute threat because it threatens their existence.
To overcome this and to live a future where it feels more like ML/LLMs live in concert with humanity then you'd have to picture a future where human value is divorced from one's capacity to provide economic value. When exactly does anyone foresee that happening? The entire system would crumble. UBI is clearly not the answer because all it does is entrench a subtle cast system and limit upward mobility and does nothing to address this root cause.
I don't know what the future is, but I know that as long as the current economic system persists (in all its permutations, whether that's socialism, capitalism, communism, whatever outmoded 19th and 20th century ideas we have to structure society -- all alienate the individual and relationships to some degree or another) then AI will always be met with disdain even in areas where it can improve people's well-being (and FWIW I think the arts and even mathematics are NOT part of this subset of use cases).
Maybe the solution is walled cities and shutting off the internet entirely; returning to our neighborhood pubs, sports, expressions of the human spirit placed up at farmers' markets. Seems like we already seem to be trending in that direction; and if last night's apocalypse was any indication maybe the internet's days are numbered anyways.
> UBI is clearly not the answer because all it does is entrench a subtle cast system and limit upward mobility and does nothing to address this root cause.
what. how?
UBI allows bad jobs to end. It allows workers to look for other work without threat to their economic conditions. Nothing about that is a cast system or limits upward mobility. it in fact, increase that mobility.
> a trend of ai winning awards is either indicative of the quality of the writing or of a systemic flaw in how these awards are judged (which seems plausible too).
I definitely think this is plausible, and I think we need to start extending the idea of code "smells" to regular languages as well. I have TAed for literature and have reviewed many a manuscript and except for really really finely honed projects with lots of editing in post, written text almost always has many of these obvious smells (cliches, fallacies, illogical juxtapositions, poor cause and effect). AI-generated prose is no exception. Character names, phrases, descriptions of sensory experiences that are off or not quite right, improper negation (LLMs still struggles with the idea of 'scope'), sentence structure being very predictable and one-dimensional (even when using the latest models and mimicking famous authors and poets and even with very careful prompting), so on and so forth, you get the idea.
> A perfect replica of a van gogh painting conveys the same artistic expression as the original.
I think OP's example was a poor one. A perfect replica of a van gogh painting indeed does convey the same artistic expression as the original. However, I think the better comparison is an understudy's mimickry of A Starry Night which seems inspired by it and yet adds nothing to the original and is somewhat deficient in some ways, and misunderstands the artistic intent of the original. That would certainly not convey the same expression as the original, and would be met with widespread criticism.
They are delusional in ways that don't overlap, though. An LLM will not be delusional in the way Van Gogh or Howard Hughes was, but humans (sane ones anyways) will not hallucinate the exact kind of odd, unpredictable LLM output that makes you go "huh? why the heck did it do this in this way or write this." Things which are extremely obvious well within the limits of even elementary human reasoning are completely outside the purview of model capability; it's much easier for a model to "reason" when it comes to systems and ideas that are very discrete (which is why it's so useful when writing code, esp. in higher-level languages -- little uncertainty there and a round-robin verification process for workflows like mathematics. However once you ask it to intuit anything that falls apart quickly; its main utility lies in being able to compensate for these deficiencies with sheer volume and burning through tokens)
Even on the frontier models these blips still happen fairly often and it's intrusive to a lot of workflows.
Looks somewhat vibe-coded. How much of this is independent work? If it's actually faithful graphic design and integrated, well-thought out code with a bit of Claude glue on top then I'm fairly intrigued, but if the entire thing was built with llm tooling then that does unfortunately sap my interest in this a lot.
I do love the idea though. I do also hate the fact that if I saw a project like this six or seven years ago I'd be in awe at it, but now that there's far less effort required, I just go, "oh neat, eh, but how functional is it really" and move on.
That's fair, and I get where you're coming from. I do use AI quite a bit for the coding side of things, and I'm not pretending otherwise.
Zac OS originally started as something I was making just for myself. I've always loved the classic Mac OS experience and wanted to bring it to modern hardware. It's actually my everyday OS now, and I figured I'd share it in case anyone else wanted to try it.
It's also a lot more than just a visual recreation. I've been trying to bring back how the original Mac OS actually worked, but integrate that functionality with modern Linux. Things like the Finder-style file management, System Folder, Control Panels, menus and the way everything interacts are meant to feel like the original Mac, while still working with modern applications, hardware and the underlying Linux system.
I'm not a professional developer, and I'm not claiming to have written every line of code myself. It's something I enjoy working on, and a lot of the development comes from using it every day, finding things that don't feel right, and improving them.
There's no big ambition behind it. I just wanted to build something I'd enjoy using, and thought others might enjoy it too.
I am really really bad with spelling and grammer. If AI writes what i need to say without adding or taking away facts, its better for both of us that is use it.
(This doesn't mean we're against using AI tools, coding agents, etc. We use them heavily ourselves! We just don't want generated or AI-edited text on HN itself.)
Writing is a skill. Use it or lose it. You've set yourself on the track of being perpetually unable to communicate in your own words without a machine intermediary massaging your ideas into grey paste. It's not good for you or your readers.
i think it would be difficult to learn how to reproduce certain phenomena that the models often exhibit. this article breaks down some of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50223647
I'm glad you had a lot of fun and I think it looks like a neat project.
I think that there is certainly room for people to develop software because it makes them happy.
I will take a look at it at some point- Thanks.
Have you been able to handle drag-and-drop?
That's one of the places that I think Linux desktops have traditionally had a lot of difficulty, particularly compared to Macos 9, because you're dragging and dropping complex objects across multiple tool kits, etc..
I really dont understand the rudeness. I've put a lot of work into this OS as my daily driver and because its been working for me so well I decided to make it public incase other people want to enjoy it as well. Its all in the README. I am not even the one who posted this here. You can simply move on and ignore this project. What are you accomplishing here?
I did not want to sound rude, sorry for the lack of tone. I am happy for you that you managed to craft a "fits like a glove" solution for yourself.
However, while I would love to use such an environment on my desktops, I'd rather use something that is handmade and properly maintained rather than someone's personal tool.
It is genuinely insane how divorced SV is from actual people and reality.
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