u/Turbo_Saxophonic

Our O Line is falling apart on every play Hurts has to fight for his life, we threw an awful interception at the goal line at the beginning which Titans converted

I think directionally you've got it sort of right but you're also over blowing it tremendously. I work at a scale up that came out of YC 2022, AI has been our main product since the beginning and we've always been all-in on using AI for engineering.

We've observed really only 2 step changes since the Wild West of the early frontier:
1. GPT 4.1 when OAI introduced dedicated training runs to make models follow natural language instructions ( + being the first usable frontier model with a 1M token context window). You don't need anything newer if you're having LLMs do verifiable work like categorization/classification/extraction of text. (You probably should use newer models bc they'll be as reliable and cheaper though).
2. Opus 4.5 for having sufficient fidelity in its weights such that you could generally apply it to any moderately common tech stack or environment and it could function.

We've been hopping on all new models since then, harnesses, what have you and we also get early access to models from the labs.

Astra is supposed to be a step change in computer use but from our evals it's not really. We haven't observed a benefit computer use so long as agents are focused on using only a few things at a time (which should be the case for plenty of reasons).

It's actually a step down in coding quality, very similar to Opus 5. It makes bizarre mistakes and the reward hacking introduced from the mountains of post training make it jump the gun in ways that are outright not feasible to stop without a human in the loop unlike other models.

Coding harness improvement hype is extremely overblown, the only thing it saves you at this point is token efficiency to a point but we have not observed anything beyond marginal gains in time/speed/context window efficiency for almost 2 years.

The 800lb gorilla in the room is cost and today models are still heavily subsidized (the labs would be profitable with current prices only if they stopped developing new models entirely which is off the table of course). It is dangerous to think of LLMs as resembling neurons or the human brain, but it is generally understood that the technology is capable of producing something resembling meaning in the human sense through embeddings.

To have a model with sufficient fidelity in those embeddings that it can be used for professional software engineering, even with a substantially lower bar for quality, you will seemingly always need some "critical mass" of embeddings and that will remain expensive for quite some time. Needing to hit constellations for all the various pieces of software engineering that happen day to day, across all kinds of environments and stacks, necessarily needs a lot of vectors/embeddings.

The real world constraints on GPU/TPU manufacturing mean it's going to be this way for many years to come.

I've seen it described as "SciFantasy", like WoW but with all the edges of an already smoothed art direction sanded down further, with a bunch of glowy and vaguely steam-punk greebles topped off with restrained performance-efficient effects and light post processing.

Nowadays I think people unconsciously register the lack of AAA fidelity like serious particle effects and modern Global Illumination as feeling cheap, and in comes the SciFantasy art design which is hyper optimized to work cheaply. Its an extremely pragmatic move to go with this art design since its visually legible at low fidelity and at any screen size which allows for wide multi-plat support for maximum potential audience size.

WA is not used that widely in North America.

iMessage is the default in the US for iPhone users who hold roughly 60% of market share, of the remaining 40% it's pretty evenly spread between Facebook messenger, Instagram, and RCS (SMS before Apple adopted RCS) with Snapchat capturing a pretty significant chunk of messaging for messaging between groups that are young (<25ish years old).

WhatsApp is pretty widespread in Mexico though so I guess technically that counts for North American adoption but even then the sheer amount of iPhone + iMessage usage in the US and Canada outweigh it.

Coward.

Why?

Why do you hope I would meet one?

Excuse my vulgar understanding but I believe the way they go in China is the CPC hands down broader, bird's eye initiatives as well as explicitly stating what sectors will have budget allocated. Then it is up local governments/provinces/cities to decide how they will use the budget to achieve those goals.

In practice its often very straight-forward, e.g. the party directs the country to increase green energy production so most local governments fund and build solar panel factories, batteries, hydroelectric power etc.

It can however be more vague, if the party directive is to reduce rural poverty, local government officials may decide its most prudent to invest the budget into big transit projects to connect their rural constituents to urban centers, or they may decide to try to foster local industries and agriculture to provide jobs directly at home.

Why would I give some fat twitchy moron with a gun and a new vest my ID.

Yeah the replay made it clear he actually tried his best to move his head to a gap/not directly into the other guy in the split second he had to react

It's been 7 fucking games and nothing has changed. This is an embarrassing game to watch it is abundantly clear to anyone level headed that we need to fire Patullo and get someone, anyone fucking halfway decent and creative.

Every drive is the same shit and everyone sees it coming and we only get saved by the density of talent on the field which is quickly going to get patchy with injuries piling up.

It's time for nick to shit and fire patullo or get off the pot because no one serious could think we're up to the task of advancing through the playoffs let alone winning the Super Bowl this year.

What the fuck is going on man

This on top of off-shored R&D costs remaining under the fucked amortization rules from the old tax bill, while US-based devs get to go back to normal and favorable tax rules from before, might help turn the tides at least somewhat.

Most people aren't saying it directly but there's the obvious distinction between modern country-pop / hick-hop and "actual" country.

Pretty massive difference between the old guard of Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash etc and even new artists like Adrienne Lenker vs Morgan Wallen and co.

Things aren't quite there yet because many (men at least) will fail over to blue collar work where the job market is still healthy and in some places roaring. I think there's many auxiliary jobs to fill for blue collar work that need degrees like OSHA inspectors and the like.

The real dark horse in this whole conversation though is what happens to the boomers' wealth as they all start passing soon and begins re-circulating. Boomers collectively own ~$75 Trillion in assets, much of that has just been laying dormant in retirement and brokerage accounts, and real estate. The vast majority of all non-billionaire wealth in the US is tied up in boomer assets.

What does the economy look like when that money starts passing their way into Millenial and GenZ inheritances? Do they start opening up new businesses? Does the consumer economy get revived, similar to the "revenge trips" phenomenon after COVID will we see a "revenge shopping" surge? Or will the healthcare and senior-care industries manage to sink their teeth and claw most of it back like they've been planning to for years?

https://preview.redd.it/eglkuazrbxcf1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ac7c6b69aa8a7ef07d2d9e0257dbf1e554548119

It's bad out here folks, 158 bus

The incompetence of the decision makers here is ridiculous. The bread and butter of this entire transit system and they're deciding to yank like 2/3 of the rush hour commute lines off?? I know they've got limited rolling stock to work with but surely you can manage to not kneecap the main fucking train line at rush hour for 2 days in a row.

The entitlement of people in this hobby is absolutely staggering. We have had global runaway inflation for nearly 5 years now, costs for everything continue to go up, and people throw fits over a ~15% price hike for a videogame? Full price games have been kept at roughly $50-$60 for 30 years.

The value of the US Dollar has halved in that time frame, if the cost of games was pegged linearly to inflation they would be $120 already but they're not.

Instead we get a wider price range where you have indie games made extremely efficiently with teams of <20 people releasing anywhere from $15-$40, Nintendo themselves pricing games accordingly from $40-$70 depending on effort spent (and eating crow when they overprice), $70 for AAA games employing 2-3 magnitudes more employees than before.

I don't see how anyone who isn't just spoiled and feeling entitled to cheap prices can get angry at this. Nintendo doesn't get to just ignore global macroeconomics and especially a dire situation at home in Japan just because people wishcast it.

They're not evil which is quite literally what some people here are implying, they are an entertainment business and they have to balance their books just like everyone else. They happen to also have the highest quality games on the market, appeal to the widest demographic, and have the best stable of beloved IPs in the industry no contest.

You can argue that this will cause sales to drop and it very well might, but I take it that Nintendo's Risk Management team knows more about doing business than the average gamer and the risk is almost certainly worth the reward in their calculations.

You can also argue that video games are increasingly being priced outside of the average persons' income bracket but that's an entirely different issue that is absolutely not unique to Nintendo and is being felt across the entire global economy.

The treatment of Nintendo as this evil megacorp with poor consumer practices just blows my mind. They're one of a handful of game companies left that give you a full, polished product on release. Yet because they have the gall to charge money for work they've done on later re-releases gamers lose their shit? Just patently absurd and childlike.

If people buy those releases then they were right to make them from a consumer and business perspective, if they were truly such awful practices people wouldn't abide by it.

Examples of actual anti-consumer products would be farmers having to hack their John Deere tractors to get around the software lockdowns, McDonalds franchisees sharing proprietary hardware and software online to fix ice cream machines forced on them in a predatory business practice.

Need I even mention egg prices and staple food products being gouged twice now in recent memory far beyond cost increases, actual core consumer goods and necessities?

Throwing fits because Nintendo, an entertainment company, has elected to only pass on 66% of cost savings onto consumers instead of 100% over the last 30 years is embarrassing.

Link to the video I believe you're referencing, having similar issues and gonna take out and hammer by burn pot a bit to see how much is built up in the hollow part.

Luvu doing this twice is an incredible lowlight lmao

And why would they vote given neither party cared enough to budge or even acknowledge that material reality in a meaningful way and regarding their specific pain points? We've had democratic operatives yelling at us till they're blue in the face for 2 years now that because the economic and job report numbers are fine, everything is fine. Meanwhile youth unemployment is rising, the ladders are being pulled up in most white collar lines of work as most corporations are on official or unofficial hiring freezes for entry level positions, health insurance is still a byzantine nightmare to navigate, etc.

Voting for the republicans is anathema for young people even though in this race they're the only ones who pretended to give a shit about the actual tangible, material issues and crises people are facing. Unfortunately for all of us that response was the scapegoating of immigrants and empty promises.

Given the recent polls released about how the primary reason for sitting out on voting was the most hot button issue of the cycle, the israel-palestine conflict, there is again no blame to be put on the young people. The party that supposedly is most aligned with them refued to budge an inch and instead sicced the full force of the security apparatus onto them, making the the wildly popular anti-war position held by young people a fast-track to becoming persona non-grata in academic and public circles. What a winning electoral strategy right?

When you're already operating on razor-thin voting margins and a crucial electoral demographic is essentially pleading with you that simply not selling weapons and stoking the flames of a conflict would buy you their vote, clearly the best course of action is to spit in their face and expel them from their schools. They see that the opposing party will fly in the face of law, precedent, and decorum to deliver tangible wins as ghastly as the repeal of Roe v Wade to their voter base and watch as "their" own party refuses to do so for their most pressing issues like student debt relief. Watching that unfold, what else could have the expected outcome been this election?

They have learned that their party plays the part of a hapless fool at best and tacitly useful idiot for their opponents at worst. So why does that party deserve their vote if those very representatives are unwilling to deliver any kind of win, reward, or meaningful change in exchange for their vote? That is the core of electoral politics, and instead we get to yet again blamed, scapegoated, and brow beaten for not showing up to vote when that is asinine backwards logic. The position that we should vote for the dems because they might help us later despite the fact they have a constant throughline of disdain for us, that has at this point evolved into open hostility, is maddening. This position can be summarized as, "the party cannot fail, only be failed" which flies in the face of the base logic of a representational democracy.

Ironic because this response is again dumbing down my points to such an extent you're replying to something I didn't write and not rebutting anything. Actually put up an argument and viewpoint or spare us all the red-scare pearl clutching. You don't get to just dismiss a counter-point as not thought or intelligent just by saying so, you need to actually respond.

It is factually impossible to pick that up from what I said, why not use your big-boy words and actually type a proper rebuttal instead of putting words in my mouth.

You also act like the consumption of short-form content is something wholly unique to the tiktok-gen z cohort when its been around in one form or another since the 20th century at the latest. If you got outside you'd often see the age bracket who's been the most affected by short-form video isn't young people, its middle-age and older folk.

Spare me the whinging about brain rot. We've heard the same exact bleating and put-downs on young people since the literal dawn of writing and mass media itself.

100 years ago it was the commodification of print and proliferation of newspapers that was said to be the harbinger the silent generation's doom.

70 years ago it was TV & Film depicting anything besides an idyllic Leave It To Beaver lifestyle and good old WASP values.

50 years ago it was rock music, hippy culture, and socialism.

30 years ago it was videogames, metal and hardcore music, and the Simpsons.

You genuinely expect us to believe that this go-around its true and that a short-form video platform is the demise of a generation? One focused primarily on subcultures and niche interests who's only broad overlapping content across its userbase is memes and trends? Hell compared to the rest of the media landscape, TikTok is positively puritan in comparison given its strict content requirements and tendency to err on the side of caution on moderation.

The attention span of your average young person is not any better or worse because of tiktok, if its affected at all its because of smartphones broadly and you're falling for its status as a scapegoat in this public spectacle.

Give me something resembling an empirical definition and some form of hard attestation of mass brainrot because I and any person applying critical thinking to this are wholly unconvinced that that is an appropriate diagnosis. Otherwise you are just blindly repeating lowbrow mass inter-generational cultural critique as sage wisdom. Young people have had silly, weird, and (from their elders perspective) esoteric humor since time immemorial.

Your position that is functionally, "the fact that kids today enjoy post-ironic meme trends in short form video format is indicative of chinese brainrot", is not a convincing argument. Certainly not one so iron-tight that it merits forcing a violation of free speech rights to the millions of tiktok users and the disruption and possibly outright destruction of the nascent small businesses that collectively form billions in economic activity which have only found their footing thanks to tiktok.

Taking any of the arguments against tiktok to their logical end points and conclusions shows how absurd this whole spectacle is. Accepting the foreign influence and propaganda claims means outright banning any media, speech, platform, or mode of communication which is at all possibly influenced from anyone not in the US or that could arbitrarily be designated an adversary. Accepting the security argument means not allowing the use of any foreign technology or software whatsoever.

Accepting the cultural argument (brainrot et al) means authoritarian rule over all media and only accepting that which complies with a rigid and arbitrary view of what is acceptable. Accepting the argument of social media platforms simply being bad for the public means none of them are acceptable, which many claim to be fine with but would in fact throw a fit when they realize that means Reddit or their platform of choice would be shutdown as well.

I only see people say this as some sort of weird gleeful put-down of young people, as if TikTok is some sort of irrestible elixir of attraction and propaganda for them.

TikTok as a platform has been the only one in the last decade that comes close to the good nature and raw authenticity of the web 2.0 era of the internet before mass adoption of Facebook and Instagram around 2014-2016.

My feed was predominantly cat videos, various niche hobbies, memes, mood boards, music discovery, poetry. It was the only social media platform I genuinely liked and enjoyed my time on and that goes for the vast majority of youth and now it's gone.

The youth are facing a crisis of cost of living, an economy in tatters, the impossibility of home ownership or even stable careers, and we found some solace in sharing in that experience on a platform that was largely relegated to people in our age bracket, and you call it Chinese brain rot?

Have you seen the kind of genuinely mean spirited nastiness that goes on in Instagram and Facebook comment sections? The insufferable snark and centrist sneering of Reddit? The far right wing outrage machine churning away on Twitter?

All we had was TikTok to carve out a presence for ourselves on the internet and now it's been banned under the most paper thin of pretenses and we, the youth who used it, are being lambasted with 20th century red scare pejoratives and sinophobia, remnants of a politick that has been dead since the fall of the USSR well before many of us were even born.

Given all of that, I genuinely don't see why anyone with an ounce of empathy wouldn't understand why we'd be upset with TikTok being banned.