I think the core of this issue that makes discussion so difficult is people are not talking about "value" in the same sense here. Anything you can sell has value to the sellers, and by basic economic theory assuming mostly rational actors and revealed preference, more value to the buyers than whatever they're exchanging it for. That doesn't automatically mean it's providing value to larger society, improving the general welfare. Figuring out how to purify cocaine from coca leaves was great for the leading narcotraficantes, and satisfied some immediate need for cheap gratification that was perceived to be more valuable over the subsequent 30 minutes or so to the buyers than continuing to hold onto spare cash. That doesn't mean it was good for humanity, good for any specific society, good for the major exporting countries at the country level, or even good for the buyers' and sellers' immediate families and communities.
I have no doubt that life has gotten more lucrative for some bounded set of people whose main goal is to churn out the largest number of websites with cheap graphics as fast as possible at minimum cost, but a lot more doubt about whether that's going to make the median life better for the median person over any grouping of humans large enough for me to care about.
Humans are next state of their local world predictors, given all previous states they are aware of. That's an entirely fair analogy. The reverse analogy for calling a human a bag of chemicals would be calling an LLM a sequence of bytes loaded from disk to memory, the most reductive possible description of any piece of software at all.
To be clear, all life is a next state of the local world predictor. What makes humans somewhat unique among life is we're much better at predicting states of the world neither we nor any of our ancestors have ever experienced, for various reasons such as having the ability to legibly communicate very complicated information strings to each other, being able to build and use tools to record states of the world we can't directly sense.
Similarly, what makes LLMs and multimodal versions of the same architectures "better" than previous generations of electronic predictive models is factors like being able to read and understand roughly the same corpus of data humans have been recording all these millennia, being able to read and remember much more of it than any individual human, and being better at generalizing than other electronic predictive models, but not better than humans. And, of course, they can produce far more predictions in far less time. Frankly, that is probably the key advantage that makes the Hacker News crowd love them so much. They're not any better at predicting byte strings that can be compiled or interpreted into executable code than humans are if you gave both infinite time to do it, but they're a lot faster.
I often wish these kinds of things didn't get posted here. This is meant for a technical audience, and "technical" here means you know something about studies like this, not you understand computing technology. I've got degrees in applied math and machine learning and barely understand the kinds of statistics that get employed in studies like this. They don't bother to explain what a proportional hazard model is because they assume readers will know because they assume readers are other scientists doing epidemological cohort studies, not a random lay audience that reads popular news sites.
In any case, the results statement is extremely confusing for a lay audience. In a proportional hazard model, they are saying one group has a 1.57% lesser chance of dying in some infinitesimal near-term time step. Obviously, every person in existence has exactly a 100% chance of death. What this is saying is that, if we measured your state as either alive or dead at fixed time intervals, as those intervals approach 0, the relative risk of death for one group versus another has a fixed proportion such that one risk is greater than another. Clearly, the probability you're going to die in the instaneous near future is not the same throughout life. But, all else being equal, if the only difference between two groups is a difference in heterozygosity, the model assumes one group will always have a higher probability than the other and the extent to which it is higher is fixed throughout life.
We do this because it is statistically tractable, but there is no clear way to translate this into terms any normal person would actually care about, which is how long from birth should I expect to live provided my life consists of some fixed set of conditions. A study like this can't tell us that. It's safe to assume the group with lower risk is going to live longer on average, but how much longer we can't tell from an analysis like this. Otherwise, that's what they would report. These results are not meant to be directly interpretable other than to say "one condition is vaguely better than another."
These things need to include more details. What is the report that ads were used to target deployed troops? What is the device use policy as of today? FOBs and semi-permanent installations are not secret locations. They're extremely obvious, have marked fences, gates, and guards in uniform. They're on satellite and aerial photos, sometimes on maps, depending on how long they've been in place. During patrols and any other movements in which unit locations are meant to be secret, as of 15 years ago when I was still serving, phones or any other kind of personal electronic device were not allowed. Even in training exercises, as far back as 2009 that I experienced, and probably further back than that, SIGINT units used radio triangulation to find and kill you when you used a phone during an exercise, which resulted in both removal from the exercise and reprimand because you weren't supposed to have a phone with you in the first place. They also captured and publicly shamed shit like getting nudes from your girlfriend or even just exchanging text messages.
If deployed personnel are sharing videos of their deployment activities to social media, how is that allowed? It can't be, right? They're violating some policy in doing that. Unit commanders have your social media accounts and monitor what you do there. Uniformed servicemembers have never had any expectation of privacy. UCMJ doesn't have 4th amendment rights. Your room, housing, belongings, car, phone, can all be searched with impunity at any time, with or without notice. All communications can and will be intercepted and read.
>Unit commanders have your social media accounts and monitor what you do there.
I’m prior Air Force, so never been deployed to a FOB, but I have never had a commander ask me for my social media accounts. I’m not sure how this is even possible. I couldn’t even tell you all my social media accounts if you define social media as a platform where people communicate directly with one another publicly (forums, marketplaces like Craigslist, etc.) You can correct me if I’m wrong, but I have never seen it happen and it seems like a pretty weak enforcement mechanism.
> UCMJ doesn't have 4th amendment rights. Your room, housing, belongings, car, phone, can all be searched with impunity at any time, with or without notice.
That’s a bit of an overstatement. For housing or computer systems owned by the military, yes, you have no expectation of privacy and they can be searched without probable cause. However, personal effects such as your phone or laptop do have protections against unauthorized searches. Commanders and military judges must have a reason for authorizing a search, that search must be narrowly tailored, and if the search does not meet these requirements the evidence can be suppressed during court martial proceedings. Good example would be US v. Nieto
That's entirely fair. It is an overstatement. What I meant was, when deployed or during an exercise, any radio communications you make, letters you write, television shows you watch, can be intercepted and read. It's not the case that 100% will be. Back in garrison, it depends on if you live in barracks or not. If you're off post, nobody is busting into your house in the middle of the night with no notice.
As for social media, it's not that they universally ask for access, but they know what is happening. I was commissioned and we knew when Soldiers shit talked us on social media. I didn't care most of the time and didn't do anything about it other than give a few warnings here and there for really egregious shit, but we knew. We can get the contents of what you post from your existing friends.
The US military hasn't yet been in a military altercation with a peer adversary that can actually exploit that information. The war in Ukraine shows that these information leaks can have severe tactical consequences.
There's a bigger problem I hope you become aware as you read more here. First, very smart people are not smart about everything. Second, nearly nobody is smart when it comes to understanding the limits of human understanding. We're bad at epistemology and probability and data collection. Primarily rural settlements from thousands of years ago did not keep accurate birth, death, and marriage records of everyone who was ever born. We can reasonably estimate very broad trends over centuries, but for a specific place in a specific year, we can't say with single-digit precision what the probability is that any random person would have been married ever or died at some particular age of some particular cause. Even now, that is very hard in many places and we use range estimates greater than a full percentage point.
That is the more important point here. Too many are arguing over whether a human researcher might have given more accurate estimates than an LLM. They may have made something more obviously internally consistent, but some facts, including a vast many historical facts, are unknowable. Hopefully, a human would say that and provide a disclaimer that these are best estimates meant for entertainment, not as a source of facts, but I don't think that's the most important point. The most important point is that readers should understand that without needing the disclaimer. Go ahead and spot check citations, but even before doing that, you need to know that no primary source knows the exact percentage of women born in 715 in the Yangtze Basin who ever married or their average age when they did. If anyone, human or LLM, makes such a claim, you should have a very high prior they're bullshitting you and demand to see how they know.
I recall trying to do simple geneaology research and my dad's side of the family drying up very quickly. Mexico didn't even have a census until 1895. The only records before that are church records, most of which didn't survive until the present day, and most of those were never digitized and aren't searchable.
I never assumed the data on how people lived ten thousand years ago was 100% accurate. Of course it's not. I had assumed it came from real research and the citation links were accurate.
When you see a picture of a dinosaur (in an educational context, not in the Flintstones), the implied assumption is that the picture is based on an educated guess of what we currently think the dinosaurs looked like. And if the picture is accompanied by a citation, that citation should contain the information used to produce the picture.
I don't think a human would have made these mistakes, because in the process of actually typing out the data most people would stop and think about where they were pulling the data from. And if they didn't—if they literally just pulled numbers out of thin air because they felt right—I would think poorly of that too!
The site was registered a month ago. If it ever actually gets and stays popular, see if it has no ads then. The economics of personal interest sites didn't change in the sense that they're any harder to make now compared to the mid-90s. The economics that changed is the Internet now has billions of users and attention being monetized can make you a lot richer now than then. It's very hard for people to see an opportunity to become a multi-millionaire by clicking a button but then not do it because they'd rather maintain a slightly better experience for their audience.
It's, of course, not even loading right now, which gets at the other problem with this "economics" framing. The biggest expense in running an actually popular website isn't creating and publishing the first version. It's paying for the infrastructure to serve a meaningful proportion of the entire world. This is clearly not a static site. It's presumably doing some computation on the server side to draw from all these hundreds of different probability distributions that works well enough for a few dozen simultaneous requests but not thousands. There might even be some kind of perverse anti-economics going on here where thought devoted upfront to efficiency and architecture might have made this far more scalable, but the "publish the first thing that passes a basic sanity check" vibe-slop ethos doesn't usually get you that.
Vibe slop? The structure of the site is quite solid, the UX decisions are spot on, the data looks good to me that knows little about this stuff, and it is entertaining and informative. This was not a one shot, a human out a lot of effort into this.
Yeah it is imperfect and was maybe not ready for the HN front page hug. But I say, bravo to the person or team!
> the data looks good to me that knows little about this stuff
I majored in history. I'd say the data is misleading. I drew a boy "In the Ganges Plain, 1411 BCE". According to the summed up data he had a 54% risk of dying of neonatal tetanus, sepsis or dysentery. Which isn't wrong as such, but it would probably have been better to sum it up with all the other diseases, parasites and infections that would be needed to reach the 54%. Like resporatory infections... "Other causes" is listed at 14%, I assume that malnutrition is part of this, but malnutrition would be the leading cause in the 4-8 year age group, and less so in others.
The life stories themselves are over dramatic. Which isn't weird, considering you don't have a lot of source material dealing with the "boring" lives. Like if you think of Scandinavia in the VIKING ages you'll find a lot of research and data on the people who went viking. In reality 95% of the populations were farmers who didn't even see the coast in their lifetimes. Unless the AI is specifically tuned to value the few sources on everyday farmin in Scandinavia higher than the ones published on viking culture in general... Well.. I think you get it.
That being said. Many people probably don't know that you could have 18 children at only see one of them grow to the age of 20 a few hundred years ago. So the data is accurate enough to be educational in my opinion.
I do think the "typical marriage age" might be suffering from AI safe-guards. For most times I've tried it seems to land oddly close to 18. Which is unfortunately much higher than reality.
I live in Denmark. So yes. I have seen a map of Scandinavia. People didn't travel. Even here in Denmark which is tiny compared to Norway and Sweden, if you only ever go in a 10-15km radius of your home then there is a good chance you won't see the ocean.
This is true. I concede. However I am not sure that the majority of people were as imobile as you say even in mideveal times there were religious pilgrimages, fairs. Maybe the lowest stratum of non free society lived in a land locked mannor and never saw the sea in Denmark but I wonder if it was the majority of people in a lifetime?
It makes me think of my college girlfriend. Her dad owned a bar, only one, that he eventually expanded to several, but even with only one, they had a home address on a canal on a small island south of Long Beach, vacationed all over the world for weeks at a time, owned a boat, dude bought his daughter a slightly less than million dollar Victorian in San Francisco in 2007 that is probably worth $10 million by now.
He'd started in his 20s as an industrial process engineer and eventually opened a string of carpet stores, then got into restaurants, earned a commercial real estate license and started buying his own stores instead of leasing, then had the opportunity to buy this bar, a rundown, tiny, poorly lit dive in Belmont Shore, a terrible place in a great location, and it eventually became the number one seller of Jameson on the entire west coast. What made owning a bar so profitable? No food, which is low margin, expensive and difficult to get approval for, requires more skill on the part of your labor to make well and handle. Low labor costs because they earn tips and don't need a real salary. Fixed space cost since he owned the building. But more than anything, sheer luck. At some point in the late 90s, his bar acquired a reputation as an easy place to get laid and it's had lines a hundred feet out the front door every night of the week ever since. Neither he nor his staff played any role in this. It's random rumors from college students creating a trend and he's the benefactor. Ended up with a cash business that 20 years ago was earning revenue in excess of a million dollars a month.
How is a competitor supposed to enter the market and replicate that? Land is scarce, so you can't just pop up into the same location if there isn't an empty building already. You can't replicate a multi-decade earned reputation except by waiting decades and earning it yourself. You can't magically become the place young people want to be even if you serve exactly the same drinks with roughly identical looking bartenders in a roughly identical looking interior. More succinctly said, you can't copy the intangibles.
The idea of a software factory long predates LLMs or any other form of automated full-program generation. The idea was to take full CI/CD pipelines that allow for rapid deployment of new components into a running system a la popular SaaS providers and web platforms that are usually single vendor or even single application, and extend the idea to a centralized production facility used by many different application vendors and consumer endpoints. Kessel Run in the US Air Force is the largest widely-touted success story I'm aware of, but I'm sure there must have been others.
Think of Netflix and Google sharing the same developer VDIs, build tooling, unit test framework, E2E test framework, promotion gates, and possibly even a common runtime platform. It's not something the commercial world tends to think much about, but in the military world you have many different vendor collaborating on a single C2 or comms system, but individually building their own production lines for each component. Centralize that and you can reduce procurement costs by de-duplicating effort, at least in theory.
Plenty of these have been built. I can buy that no one has built a fully-automated set of agents running on common compute, storage, and network substrates that can create, verify, and ship arbitrary software from vague natural language desirements alone, but that isn't the same thing and it's kind of a shame they decided to use an already in-use name for this. As many have pointed out, real physical factories don't do this, either. They build and ship the same thing with the same physical design in arbitrary quantities, which is a much easier problem to solve. Any Linux distro or mobile app store already does that.
> This feature is experimental and is being introduced to the Firefox user base through a progressive rollout. It may not yet be available to all users. Additionally, remote improvements must be enabled.
Apparently, you can only block ads if you allow Mozilla telemetry. Thanks, dicks.
Must we? Such vulgar swipes only weaken your position, making you seem like the bigger jerk. Please observe the guidelines, not because you owe Mozilla anything but because you owe this community and indeed yourself better than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Appending "Thanks, dicks" weakens the comment because it demonstrates they have nothing to say other than vulgarity, which means they have nothing substantive to say at all. We never object to profanity by itself on HN. We do object to abusive swipes and name-calling, because it pulls discussion away from HN's primary purpose, which is curious conversation, and drags it towards the gutter.
While I have you: could you please have a re-read of the guidelines and have a think about if you really intend to participate here earnestly? We've asked you several times to lift your game, and we're not seeing any effort to reform. This place only continues to exist because we have guidelines and uphold them daily, and enough other people make the effort to contribute positively. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Deeply frustrating - I felt like Mozilla was gaslighting me -- I spent 3 minutes double-checking that even after updating Firefox minutes ago the option is still not visible to me.
Making an announcement when fewer than 40% of your customers will see the feature fees like (unintentional) gaslighting.
I HATE it when a company does a staged rollout of something after making a big announcement. If you're going to announce something, then don't stage the rollout. Its off by default after all..
23 em-dashes in the span of a single README. I gotta hand it to Anthropic. They seriously managed to find a completely legal way to sell crack to crack addicts using other crack addicts as their unpaid sales force.
I have no doubt that life has gotten more lucrative for some bounded set of people whose main goal is to churn out the largest number of websites with cheap graphics as fast as possible at minimum cost, but a lot more doubt about whether that's going to make the median life better for the median person over any grouping of humans large enough for me to care about.
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