YHK - yet another hacker news clone

At the end this repeats that AI has reversed huge reductions in CO2 emissions. I keep seeing this. Is this chart wrong?

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states

The second chart is the one I’m looking at. Where is the 15 year reversal? If zoom in I see a small uptick. Not a 15 year trend reversal.

There's something I find difficult when reading this piece. The thing is, I've been making a living as a programmer and I'm now in my seventh year, but programming wasn't actually my major. I majored in computational physics in university, jumped into programming on that basis, and taught myself programming. So does that mean I have no right to make up programming problems and ask questions? I mean, couldn't Bill Gates have studied biology hard and understood things outside his own field too?

Or is the theme of the piece that one ought to have epistemic humility?

But the thing is, this piece itself also makes claims about psychology, power theory, and human nature to some degree, which is ironic. But that can't be it. Because this piece has no epistemic humility in it.

Then, if we demand according to what this piece says, in the end it comes down to "no one can test AI outside the major they studied in university" — but honestly, isn't it just a matter of buying the textbooks and papers and testing AI with them?

It's a slightly difficult problem.

The overconfidence effect is well documented and a known thing in light aircraft private aviation. People with education and good paying professional careers (doctors, lawyers, dentists, etc) who have the disposable income to buy a $300,000 aircraft and maintain it can easily become overconfident in their abilities. Because they're good at one thing in their life that requires a lot of education and training, they think it automatically extends to every other domain of knowledge that they set themselves to.

The original v-tailed Beechcraft Bonanza used to be known as the "v-tailed doctor killer".

> Anything approaching my skill level is superhuman

Or someone has the impression that Ai can code as well as them (and find errors) but at 10x the speed or more. They then conclude that human ability and superhuman speed is superhuman in total.

These people are going to be so cruel and vindictive when they are finally forced to look up. Not looking forward to it :(

This article first makes a point that Gates isn’t expert enough in biology to assess AIs capability to answer complex questions on the topic as being a breakthrough.

Then immediately goes on to say that his comments about AI coding are arrogant despite being an expert in that field with more experience than nearly anyone.

Unsure how to interpret that.

he presents the idea of Bill Gates observing an OpenAI model a. doing "complex" biology problems, b. some coding problems, and then based on his assumption that Bill Gates knows rudimentary biology, and used to also write code, the fact that Bill Gates is impressed with the OpenAI model means Bill Gates thinks he has superhuman biology and coding skills. This simply does not follow.

This would be like if I went in my garage, spent several weeks with the 3d printer and CNC machine to build a robot that can "dance", then I made a video of me dancing about as well as your average dad at a wedding along with my dancing robot and I said "this thing can dance better than me!", therefore: "Ha, your robot sucks! You must think you're Baryshnikov if you call that dancing". I mean this is kind of sad.

Slightly more than a couple of years ago, just observing an LLM coherently doing work at the academic level of a sixth grader was brand new to all of us. Which was objectively impressive. It doesnt matter "so what? anyone can do 6th grade math"....this..is not..the point...

edit: the point they want to make, that these people are not qualified to make dire predictions about "superintelligence", and that they see themselves fit to determine "superintelligence" based on watching the robots be smarter than them, is one I generally agree with, and their certainty originates from a kind of hubris. but it's not a hubris you can assign to the general LLM-using population as this seems to be doing. Most people using LLMs think the "superintelligence" thing is a load of bunk (probably moreso than the general population who seem to be cowering in terror).

I find the authors point not very compelling.. Bill Gates was by all accounts an exceptional programmer at one point and then spent a long time evaluating software engineers. He seems like a natural person to gauge AI progress in coding?

Around when AI was getting much better at SQL I was writing SQL everyday at work and had been for years. I don’t think it would’ve been hubris for me to judge that it was getting really good and would shortly be super human at SQL. It would’ve been correct anyway.

Ah yes, the professor from Hoboken is here to teach us that tech bros are delusional, and it’s really professors from Hoboken who know what is actually going on.

Biases and heuristics have become somewhat mainstream “intellectualism”, but just like people using the words prolific and myriad incorrectly, is leveraged here to a false conclusion.

The anti-AI narrative continues, to the detriment of those who listen to its self-destructive guidance that equates excessive enthusiasm with delusion.

None of this matters. By the time truth out itself, the Kushner's, Gate's, Andreeson's, and Altman's of the world will have walked off with hundred of billions of our 401k money.

Being successful is a form of being rich as enriching my hobbies, lifestyle, work profile and processes. Income doesn't need to be money to be useful.

I am no fan of Bill Gates. He's pedophile adjacent, in my *opinion.

But I was there. He worked really, really fucking hard. As did most of the early crowd. If you're asking yourself how people back then worked so hard, just realize that there are drugs that can help you do that.

As usual with posts like these, this is someone trying to turn their emotions into logic.

> I picked on Bill Gates above to illustrate the overconfidence effect

After having read your blog i can assert you've demonstrated that effect on yourself. Bill has all capability and credentials proven so we know this guy is an authority on software engineering topics, you have zero if i'm not mistaken.

Author is spot on on Bill Gates. By his own admission, his company essentially missed the coming of the Internet, and we all literally suffer today for it.

He missed the coming interconnectedness of the machines and instead presumed that every computer was going to be a fancy copy machine calculator (that will never talk to others, thus security is not needed).

A massive hole in perception.

I'm trying to find the exact clip, but there's a segment of an interview where Elon Musk explains why he finds it likely that we are living in a simulation, and part of his evidence is how unlikely he finds it to be him: He's the richest man in the world, the first trillionaire, he's influencing geopolitics and launching space rockets.

He finds it so astounding to be himself, to feel like the Main Character of the World that he considers this evidence that the world he experiences is a simulation. The more humbling proposition -- that the world is largely random and he just happens to be the guy who kept rolling sixes -- is less compelling.

What is the opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect? Where you believe since you don’t know anything about a topic (eg biology), therefore nobody else can (you may have some incredible decades of research experience to have novel thoughts on it)?

The first part of the article makes sense in that:

In any system of competing agents (such as human beings) where the reward for performance can enhance performance, will always result in even minor random differentials in initial performance exponentially accumulating until one or a handful of individuals dominate. In such a system, only a small portion of success can be attributed to innate skills. So it's true that success in itself, while signaling fitness to survive, does not necessarily signal an outsized ability to make accurate judgements.

I'm not entirely clear what the second part of the article is trying to convey. Is it that highly successful individuals attribute their success entirely to their skill and therefore when a machine is able to replicate their skillset, they are surprised and consider the technology to be world-altering?

"the very notion that something else could be "as good as I am" is, first of all, hard to believe and secondly necessarily means that it's "superhuman". That man is not lacking self-esteem, no sirree, Bob. "

I like that the article just tries to pass off a computer program coding at the level of humans (not to mention solving Millennium Problems) as something that should be just be totally unsurprising. Bill Gates is just a dumb arrogant tech bro to be surprised that a neural network exceeds his abilities at coding.

I think this is written forgetting a lot of the context of the time (I was at a relevant part of the industry to be present around some of the early “oh shit this thing works” moments).

It was absolutely not a given that next-token prediction would scale to the point that it could answer outside of its training domain (this is the point about “made up questions”, it was important to test it on material outside of the training set since the scale of training was yet-unheard-of at the time).

Further, the success of post-training on verifiable tasks (coding) was also a complete shock that changed the world overnight. LLMs jumped the “I can make code” to “I confidently can make code that solves your problem” chasm suddenly, and it has changed the industry.

For someone so invested in this from the early days (remember the scale of Microsoft’s commitment) it is entirely logical that testing things “on day one” would occur and this would be a much bigger shock compared to most people that learned of advances at the same time as the rest of the world. (There are huge delays between research capabilities and shipping)

It seems pretty clear to me that Bill was saying AI was as good as him a few months ago and now it is superhuman. This is an interview transcript, remember, not a written affidavit. Humans can switch focus mid stream.

Programming has always been just plumbing.

Designing new algorithms is where the real skill is, but an average programmer will never do this, and even a 10x programmer will do it maybe a few times in their lifetime at most.