pcrh (u/pcrh) - Readit News

pcrh commented on French supermarket's Christmas advert is worldwide hit (without AI) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=Na9Vm... · Posted by u/gbugniot

Dilettante_ · 3 days ago

You think the company went "ah forget about profit, we'll spend our money for the good of the people"?

The company is virtue signaling, pandering, and you're falling for it. Jesus Christ.

pcrh · 3 days ago

Bah! Humbug!

pcrh commented on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden andyljones.com/posts/hors... · Posted by u/pbui

hn_throwaway_99 · 4 days ago

> That is, it took 25 to 30 years after mass production of automobiles was started by Ford for 50% of "horsepower" to be replaced

I just googled "average horse lifespan", and the answer that came back was, exactly, "25-30 years". There's a clue in that number for you.

pcrh · 4 days ago

Yes, I considered that. Someone using a horse-drawn wagon to deliver goods about town would likely not consider buying a truck until the cart horse needed replacing.

The working life of a horse may be shorter than the realistic lifespan. Searching for "horse depreciation" gives 7 years for a horse under age 12, the prime years for a horse being between 7 and 12 yrs old, depending on what it is used for.

I'm willing to accept the input of someone more knowledgeable about working horses, though!

pcrh commented on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden andyljones.com/posts/hors... · Posted by u/pbui

hn_throwaway_99 · 5 days ago

> For what it's worth, the decline in use of horses was much slower than you might expect.

Not really, given that the article goes into detail about this in the first paragraph, with US data and graphs: "Then, between 1930 and 1950, 90% of the horses in the US disappeared."

pcrh · 5 days ago

Eyeballing the chart in the OP and the French data shows them to have a comparable pattern. While OP's data is horses per person, and the French is total number of horses, both show a decline in horse numbers starting about 10 years after widespread adoption of the motor vehicle and falling to 50% of their peak in the mid- to late-1950's, with the French data being perhaps a bit over 5 years delayed compared to the US data. That is, it took 25 to 30 years after mass production of automobiles was started by Ford for 50% of "horsepower" to be replaced.

The point isn't to claim that motor vehicles did not replace horses, they obviously did, but that the replacement was less "sudden" than claimed.

pcrh commented on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden andyljones.com/posts/hors... · Posted by u/pbui

s17n · 5 days ago

This is a fun piece... but what killed off the horses wasn't steady incremental progress in steam engine efficiency, it was the invention of the internal combustion engine.

pcrh · 5 days ago

Quite. For reference, the horse population of France didn't decline significantly until the late 1940's [0].

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7023172/

pcrh commented on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden andyljones.com/posts/hors... · Posted by u/pbui

hn_throwaway_99 · 5 days ago

I feel like this sort of misses the point. I didn't think the primary thrust of his article was so much about the specific details of AI, or what kind of tasks AI can now surpass humans on. I think it was more of a general analysis (and very well written IMO) that even when new technologies advance in a slow, linear progression, the point at which they overtake an earlier technology (or "horses" in this case), happens very quickly - it's the tipping point at which the old tech surpasses the new. For some reason I thought of Hemingway's old adage "How did you go bankrupt? - Slowly at first, then all at once."

I agree with all the limitations you've written about the current state of AI and LLMs. But the fact is that the tech behind AI and LLMs never really gets worse. I also agree that just scaling and more compute will probably be a dead end, but that doesn't mean that I don't think that progress will still happen even when/if those barriers are broadly realized.

Unless you really believe human brains have some sort of "secret special sauce" (and, FWIW, I think it's possible - the ability of consciousness/sentience to arise from "dumb matter" is something that I don't think scientists have adequately explained or even really theorized), the steady progress of AI should, eventually, surpass human capabilities, and when it does, it will happen "all at once".

pcrh · 5 days ago

For what it's worth, the decline in use of horses was much slower than you might expect. The model T Ford motor car reached peak production in 1925 [0], and for an inexact comparison (I couldn't find numbers for the US) the horse population of France started to decline in 1935, but didn't drop below 80% of its historical peak until the late 1940's down to 10% of its peak by the 1970's [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T#Mass_production

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7023172/

pcrh commented on 'Extraordinary Discovery' at Orkney's Ness of Brodgar Neolithic Site bbc.com/news/articles/c78... · Posted by u/ohjeez

pcrh · 6 days ago

>"totally dissimilar to anything else we've uncovered". "a site that can be seen to be defined by straight lines and rectangular forms, from the architecture down to the art". "without parallel in Atlantic Europe".

Straight lines and rectangular forms in Orkney? Must be aliens.

pcrh commented on The past was not that cute juliawise.net/the-past-wa... · Posted by u/mhb

pcrh · 6 days ago

Cottagecore is almost entirely an aesthetic and nostalgic trend.

Such aesthetics have a long history, well illustrated by bucolic visions of "simple" peasant life from the classical Greek and Roman era , e.g. Theocritus in 300 BC [0], to the 19th century paintings by John Constable.

It has little to do with the actual realities of living a rural agrarian life. Let alone a pre-industrial one.

So the tone of much of the discussion in this thread (technology vs simplicity) a little curious, to say the least.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theocritus#Bucolics_and_mimes

pcrh commented on The past was not that cute juliawise.net/the-past-wa... · Posted by u/mhb

bigstrat2003 · 7 days ago

I'm not really convinced it's actually possible to overthrow a modern government. The disparity in killing power available to the two sides is just too great. Like yeah we outnumber the government a million to one (figuratively), but that's not going to help much when they have tanks, artillery, and planes to defend themselves with.

pcrh · 6 days ago

That depends on your definition of "overthrow".

Governments are routinely replaced in western democracies.

pcrh commented on How Brussels writes so many laws siliconcontinent.com/p/ho... · Posted by u/amadeuspagel

disgruntledphd2 · 9 days ago

Where are you getting your Irish numbers from?

This source [0] suggests around 300k if we count everything.

It looks like you are just counting the core "civil" servants and defence maybe?

[0] https://publicjobs.ie/en/information-hub?view=article&id=247...

pcrh · 9 days ago

Irish Times: "More than 50,000 staff now employed in Civil Service "

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2025/04/15/more-than-5000...

pcrh commented on How Brussels writes so many laws siliconcontinent.com/p/ho... · Posted by u/amadeuspagel

zermelo · 9 days ago

I'm going to play devil's advocate: the EU's mission was to bring peace. Maybe 80,000 employees producing garbage is a small price to pay for piece.

pcrh · 9 days ago

Agreed. The EU institutions are remarkably efficient compared to their national equivalents. 80,000 civil servants is a tiny number for a polity of 450 million people. Ireland for example has 50,000 for a population of 1/10th the size.

Admittedly however, the scope of national civil services tends to be much larger than that of the EU's.