evklein (u/evklein) - Readit News

evklein commented on I'm worried it might get bad danielmiessler.com/blog/i... · Posted by u/conzar

joquarky · 18 days ago

A materialist could logically conclude that it still has some way to go.

evklein · 13 days ago

Well I'd probably consider myself a materialist but I'm not sure I'd agree. The evidence to me seems that it can really only come from two places: additional compute or new breakthroughs in AI learning. Compute's coming, certainly, but that only has the potential to improve things if it's added in conjunction with a commensurate AI breakthrough. I think the trend in improvement for transformer could be logistic, not exponential, like a lot of the snake-oil salesman like to state. And while there's plenty of evidence for compute there isn't much for the AI breakthrough that leads to an exponential jump, and if it does exist it's a trade secret, so until we know we don't know.

evklein commented on State of AI in Business 2025 [pdf] nanda.media.mit.edu/ai_re... · Posted by u/candiddevmike

jpadkins · 13 days ago

I can't take paper seriously when they have sentences like this:

> In an agentic web, systems will autonomously discover optimal vendors and evaluate solutions without human research, establish dynamic API integrations in real-time without pre-built connectors, execute trustless transactions through blockchain enabled smart contracts, and develop emergent workflows that self-optimize across multiple platforms and organizational boundaries. Early experiments show procurement agents identifying new suppliers and negotiating terms independently, customer service systems coordinating seamlessly across platforms, and content creation workflows spanning multiple providers with automated quality assurance and payment.

evklein · 13 days ago

grok, summarize this for me

evklein commented on Adults Are Going to Sleep-Away Camp to Make Friends. It Seems to Work wsj.com/style/adult-sleep... · Posted by u/impish9208

evklein · 17 days ago

There's a subset of sleepaway camps for adults that are quite popular for musicians - they typically consist of sleeping in cabins at night and attending lessons and workshops throughout the day. I went to one a few years ago, and even though I was a full standard deviation off from the mean in terms of age I still had a good time. This seems like a cool idea too.

evklein commented on I'm worried it might get bad danielmiessler.com/blog/i... · Posted by u/conzar

fusslo · 18 days ago

Isn't the sector for software that is life-critical really small? medical devices, and maybe some control software? Oh and probably defense too

I don't feel much better ( as someone who has spent their career in consumer electronics )

evklein · 18 days ago

> Isn't the sector for software that is life-critical really small?

I think it's large. Think about the software that goes into something like air travel - ATC, weather tracking, the actual control software for the aircraft... I am aware that nothing is perfect, but I'd at least like to know that a person wrote those things who could be held accountable.

evklein commented on I'm worried it might get bad danielmiessler.com/blog/i... · Posted by u/conzar

fusslo · 18 days ago

I've been thinking about this lately.

While we engineers understand how to judge and evaluate AI solutions, I am not sure Business Owners (BO) care.

BO's are ok with a certain percentage of bugs/rework/inefficiency/instability. And the tradeoff of eliminating (or marginalizing) Engineering may be worth the increased percentage of unfavorable outcomes.

evklein · 18 days ago

Probably depends on BO/stakeholder as well. B2B solution that has a low risk of killing anyone? Maybe fuck it, let the model have its way.

Technology that controls software that keeps people alive, controls infrastructure, etc., uhhhh I don't think so. I guess we're just waiting for the first news story of someone's pacemaker going haywire and shocking them to death because the monitoring code was vibed through to production.

evklein commented on I'm worried it might get bad danielmiessler.com/blog/i... · Posted by u/conzar

sauwan · 18 days ago

Presumably, AI has advanced in 10 years?

evklein · 18 days ago

Do you believe there's a threshold to how good this stuff can get, or do you think it's all infinite upside?

evklein commented on OpenAI's "Study Mode" and the risks of flattery resobscura.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/benbreen

evklein · a month ago

Okay so, I gave this a shot last week while studying for one of my finals for grad school. I fed it the course study guide and had it prompt me. I got the sense that it wasn't doing anything remarkable under the hood, that it was mostly system prompt engineering at the end of the day. I studied with it for about an hour and a half, having it feed me practice questions and flashcards. I believe that it really only pushed back on me on one answer, which made me feel like I had the thing in the bag. My actual result on the final was fairly bad - which was irritating, because I went in feeling probably a bit better than I should have. I don't know if I can lay that corpse at OpenAI's feet, but regardless I don't think there's enough there for me to keep using it. I could just write my own system prompt if I liked.

evklein commented on Rising young worker despair in the United States nber.org/papers/w34071... · Posted by u/johntfella

bananapub · a month ago

another side to this is how it's encouraging people to believe that the only way to get ahead is by more or less scamming. you can easily look at the world as a youngish person and see that getting ahead means affiliate marketing, or NFT scams, or crypto nonsense, or being Andrew Tate, or an "influencer" hawking crap on social media etc.

it's not just a lack of role models, it's also the way current governments in the west are setting policies - extreme care for older more established people or the already rich, while the young being thrown to the wolves with idiotic LLM/AI policies sabotaging their lives and careers, future pension likely clearly going down, the ultrawealthy having increasingly literal impunity, policies designed to keep housing unaffordable, etc

evklein · a month ago

The way I think about this is if you split the money-making opportunities into two pools; one is rent-seeking/grifting/outright-scamming/beating greater-fool fallacy, the other is learning some sort of skill/trade and developing a career on that. At some point the perceived opportunity cost for the first eclipsed the latter, and now that's sort of where we're at.

Certain characters love to say things like "no one wants to work anymore." I think the rise of certain scamminess in our culture actually flies in the face of that; people will work insanely hard at whatever their thing is, be it an MLM or a crypto-grift. But they work hard because _they think that's where they can get the most value._ What's the value in going to school for 4, 6, 8, 10 years when you can make it big in the next big thing?

evklein commented on Rising young worker despair in the United States nber.org/papers/w34071... · Posted by u/johntfella

GlibMonkeyDeath · a month ago

As the parent of two mid-20's adults (one thriving, the other not so much) I actually downloaded the paper and read it out of curiosity (shocking, I know.)

They asked people how many days last month they had "bad mental health days" ("Q1".) The measure of Despair in the graphs is constructed as: "by setting the Q1 variable to one when an individual gave the answer 30 and zero otherwise." So if you had a continuous month of "bad mental health days" you are in despair. The fraction of those months is y-axis in the graphs (typically around 0-10%)

This is all US data BTW.

Anyway, the abstract and title oversimplify the data in my opinion. Across the board (even up to 60+ years of age) the surveyed report overall 2x more "despair" than in the 1990's. Yes, it is worse amongst under 40 workers, as shown in Figure 4. Despair used to be pretty flat by age for workers, now it it highest for young workers, with linear-ish decrease until about 60 where the value hasn't really changed over time.

But the graph in Figure 8 shows that "despair" hasn't really moved much for any age group of college educated workers since the 1990's. And their mention of the change in the "hump" shaped in the abstract doesn't account for the fact that in absolute terms, unsurprisingly, the unemployed have a lot more despair overall than workers.

So the "young workers" in the title are those without a college education in the US - that's probably a very different demographic than the average HN participant...

evklein · a month ago

I'll defend that variable selection a little bit, as I feel that the measure they use to capture 'despair' is actually binary in reality. I'd categorize a handful of young men around my age as being in this category. What they seem to have in common with each other is a consistent downtrodden-ness that doesn't fluctuate much from day to day; it's pervasive to their entire personality, it's who they are.

I imagine if you studied this is a less discrete, non-binomial method you'd see even sharper trends. I don't know a single person my age who feels the future has anything for them.

evklein commented on Yet another bad three months as Tesla reports its Q2 2025 results arstechnica.com/cars/2025... · Posted by u/duxup

spacemadness · a month ago

In other words, it’s a cult stock.

evklein · a month ago

Yeah, seems like it's even worse in that it's a _death cult_. The people in it know that it's not worth what the market prices it at, so they know any sudden moves in the wrong direction and they're gonna lose all that value. That leaves no choice but to double down and never stop. The collapse of this thing is going to be incredible.