I'm not a mathematician but it seems to me that if all it took to solve the problem was an enthusiast level understanding of the domain and a few hundred dollars of tokens then the result probably isn't that valuable. Even assuming you are the first person in the world to solve it, these kinds of LLM-friendly problems that are now easy to solve and easy to verify will almost certainly be picked off by one person or another in the near future.
It's also possible that the result is already known and you just weren't aware of it. It's easy for someone outside of a field, or even one steeped in it, to not be aware of certain solutions.
Yeah Chinese oil reserves were much larger than was publicly known. They immediately cut imports by a massive amount as soon as the war started and have been able to keep it up for months. Without that the economic fallout would have been far greater.
Not that they are doing it for this reason, but they have done a lot to shield trump from the consequences of his stupid war. But those supplies can only hold for so long; things can get much worse for the world economy in the near future.
China took 5.5 million barrels per day of demand off of the table overnight. A quarter of what went through the strait. They single-handedly stopped catastrophe by months.
Even with that, global strategic petroleum reserves are quickly draining. Last I looked, the US was down to ~290M. There is a legal limit of 250M (though laws don’t matter anymore). The structural floor is also estimated to be somewhere north of 200M.
The world is about to not be able to meet all oil demand for any price.
20+ years of preparation does a pretty good job though.
I often wonder about the world we would live in if the Brooks Brothers Riot had not succeeded. That appears to have been the turning point for the fall of the USA, and even more sadly, humanity.
An experienced runner can almost always tell if another person is an experienced runner by watching them run or hearing them talk about the activity. Same for a mathematician, or a car mechanic, or a software engineer. I don't see why the experience of mental illness would be different from every other kind of experience.
To be fair, it is different because it impairs perception.
There's good evidence that depressed people are better at detecting simple sadness in others, and there's some evidence that depressed people are better at correctly predicting when things will have neutral or negative outcomes, but beyond that it gets a lot hazier, because depression messes with empathy, tends to project itself onto the world, and because non-depressed people will mirror your sadness when talking to you, etc. etc.
(I'm not talking about depression, though, but burnout, which is its own animal.)
Dems are certainly less evil and marginally more competent, but they are still an unpopular shit show. Even with trump attacking America left and right and becoming deeply unpopular for it they're only a coin flip to win the senate. Vance is the single most likely person to become the next president.
> something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.
Unfortunately this is completely opposed to the goals of the companies creating AI. An org like Google for example couldn't care less if people are viewing quality art and having their lives enriched by it, but they love it when people spend endless hours viewing slop on youtube.
If we as a society want more of the former it won't happen with the help of leading AI companies, it will only in direct conflict with them since the two goals are in direct opposition.
I'm not going to vouch for every single HN comment, but running a large established company is fundamentally different from founding a startup, and I think most people recognize that. Getting a big company CEO job has way way more to do with networking and reputation than any sort of technical competence.
When one of those jobs comes open it's almost guaranteed to be filled with someone from a specific .00001% of the population. Who most of the time also happens to be golfing buddies with at least one board member. Are corporate boards that amazing at sifting through millions of potential candidates and finding the meritocratic best fit? I doubt it.
Few Americans have done more than musk to destroy state capacity and to enable corruption on a massive scale, all while enriching himself to an unprecedented degree. That's great for him and his cronies that he has gotten so wealthy doing it, but he's been a huge net-negative to most humans.
I get that rockets are cool and a lot of people in the tech bubble think that starlink is the greatest thing ever, but most people don't care about that nearly as much as they care about seeing their children die from preventable diseases he cut the funding for or getting violently ill because he drove thousands of food inspectors and researchers out of a job.
Handling the enormous federal debt that he continues to play a part in worsening is going to very painful in the long run.
So where is the guy who is respectful to the government and compliant with regulations that is out there building millions of EVs, rockets, and massive satellite constellations? If he existed I could respect your argument. But in reality the only guy who seems to be able to build a modern mass manufacturing company in the US is the trillionaire who runs roughshod over all forms of government oversight that gets in his way. That should tell you something about where the problem lies here.
Elon Musk isn't the problem, he is the symptom. The problem is that it is basically required to be ruthless and corrupt to get anything done in this country at the scale, price, and timeline needed to be commercially viable. The solution is less regulation and bureaucracy, not more.
yeah yeah you're being reductive because you want to dismiss it, but that's essentially what they are... it's not like the dude is solving world hunger (which he is uniquely resourced to actually do), he wants to be space AT&T and is capitalizing on the degradation of public infrastructure using the funding that should be building it
It's a bit naive if you think lack of money is the cause of "world hunger". There is plenty of money, and governments have far more than he does. On the other hand, connecting previously unconnected (and some unconnectable) regions is a huge boon to their population. Starlink is great.
I think the root of the problem is “vetocracy.” We’ve created a system where small minorities can hold everything up, sometimes for ideological reasons and sometimes for financial reasons. The classic case of the latter is homeowners opposing all home construction to raise their property values, but it happens in other areas too.
Vetocracy isn’t democracy. It’s a tiny minority having veto power.
So yes the only person who succeeds in such a system is a human battering ram who can just bash their way through it by being a manic asshole with insane force of will.
There should be tons of Elon Musks, including nicer ones, but nice people get vetoed.
Lol why is this downvoted? There is no dispute that he spent hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Trump and seat himself in government while his companies are financially dependent on government programs and contracts. This is an obvious conflict of interest, and also completely on par with all of the other corruption we're seeing from this administration.
Exactly. I actually laughed out loud at OP's comment. Elon Musk has never done anything to benefit the broader "us." The idea that "we" need people like Musk to "dig us out of this situation" --a situation that rich men like Musk put us into in the first place-- is absolutely ridiculous.
Billionaires don't "dig" anything except the foundations for things that are going to make them even more money.
To prevent countless thousands of easily preventable deaths. Human problems don't just stop at some point, especially in poor areas that are also getting hit the hardest by climate change. Are you also upset that western countries have been giving their poorest citizens food for decades?
> Samsung just includes too much overlapping bloat "features"
Yep, that's a major drawback. My partner has a Samsung phone and seeing all of the included bloatware, plus the terrible updates and add even more, made me not even consider one of their devices last time I bought a phone.
At work we bought a used tablet off eBay to replace a customer device where they really wanted an identical (obsolete) model.
OMG the amount of extra crap that Verizon branded tablet had pre-installed was agonizing.
All system apps so you couldn't get rid of it.
It's worth mentioning that on most Android phones and tablets, you can uninstall apps from the user partition even when they are system apps with adb or a UI for it like UAD-ng.
i take the position that it's all dog shit and i dont care whos fault it is, all of these people need to be put in front of a tribunal and justice done
Eh, it depends on how you use it. I have a heavily used Linux laptop that's almost a decade old and I still love it.
I've had various work and personal MacBooks over the years and don't really miss them. It sounds like their quality has gotten somewhat better in recent cycles but the era of keyboards so fragile they break if you sneeze on them, and gimmicks like turning part of the keyboard into a touch screen were terrible. I would absolutely take a Linux machine from that era that costs half as much over any of those devices.
One caveat is that there are Apple-specific features like some of the trackpad gestures that I've never been a heavy user of. Partly because they aren't that interesting to me, and partly because I don't like having my workflows and muscle memory tied to a specific platform I don't control. Someone heavily into those features might have a harder time switching away.
It's also possible that the result is already known and you just weren't aware of it. It's easy for someone outside of a field, or even one steeped in it, to not be aware of certain solutions.
reply