> The other thing you're failing to look at is momentum and majority opinion. When you look at that... nothings going to change, it's like asking an addict to stop using drugs. The end game of AI will play out, that is the most probably outcome. Better to prepare for the end game.
Perhaps I didn't sound pessimistic enough lol? I completely agree what you're saying here. This is happening whether we like it or not.
On global warming I also agree you're not going to get every nation to coordinate, but least global warming has a forcing function somewhere down the line since there's only a limited amount of fossil fuels in the ground that make economical sense to extract. AI on the other hand really has no clear off-path, at every point along the way it makes sense to invest more in AI. I think at best all we can expect to do is slow progress, which might just be enough to ensure the our generation and the next have a somewhat normal life.
My p(doom) is near 99% for a reason... I think that AI progression is basically almost a certainty – like maybe a 1/200 chance that no significant progress is made from here over the next 50 years. And I also think that significant progress from here more or less guarantees a very bad outcome for humanity. That's a harder one to model, but I think along almost all axises you can assume there's about 50 very bad outcomes for every good outcome – no cancer cure without super viruses, no robotics revolution without killer drones, no mass automation without mass job loss which results in destabilising the global order and democratic systems of governance...
I am prepping and have been for years at this point... I'm an OG AI doomer. I've been having literal nightmares about this moment for decades, and right now I'm having nightmares almost every night. It's scares me because I know all I can do is delay my fate and that of those I love.
I’ve spent a lot of time working on data pipelines, and one of the most frustrating problems is accidentally syncing PII or developer secrets (like AWS keys or SSNs) into a data warehouse or downstream system.
Most of the enterprise tools that solve this are either massive Java applications, require complex Python environments, or cost $50k/year. I just wanted a lightning-fast, single binary I could drop into a CI/CD pipeline (--fail-on-pii) or run locally against a Postgres DB to see my exposure. So, I built pii-hound.
A few technical details on how it works under the hood:
Memory Efficiency: Scanning a 50GB CSV file shouldn't cause an OOM error. It uses a concurrent, streaming architecture and implements Reservoir Sampling so it can sample huge datasets sequentially while maintaining randomness and a tiny memory footprint.
Speed: For the keyword and column-name heuristics, I implemented Aho-Corasick string matching, which is significantly faster than running dozens of individual regexes against every header.
Accuracy: To cut down on false positives, things like Credit Card numbers don't just use regex; they are piped through a Luhn algorithm validation step.
Full transparency: I originally wrote the core of this scanning engine for a larger data management platform I’m building called Saddle Data. But I realized the scanner itself is incredibly useful as a standalone utility, so I extracted it, polished the CLI, and open-sourced it under the MIT license.
It currently supports Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, SQLite, S3, GCS, and local files (CSV/JSON/Parquet).
I'd love for you to point it at a local database or a messy CSV and let me know how it performs. Happy to answer any questions about the Go implementation, and PRs for new regex rules or source connectors are very welcome!
Maybe some bot signed up using your email and then did bot things on it. I've had that happen a lot over the years. My Microsoft account is still stuck in German because that's the language the bot used when creating the account (to spam X-Box apparently).
I think it's also true that many people are wildly out of touch when they think about how "safe" their local municipality is.
The Bay Area is objectively safe, for example, yet I constantly run into neighbors in affluent neighborhoods who are afraid of venturing various places, letting their kids play outside or bike to school, or just generally exploring around.
I was at a BayFC match last weekend, for example, and ran into the family of an acquaintance from my elementary daughter's school. They have an 8th grader and are trying to get an intra-district transfer approved for high school so she doesn't have to go to the neighborhood school where a student brought a ghost gun on campus 3 years ago (he was arrested and successfully prosecuted, and no one was hurt)... and instead go to the local school where a handful of kids arranged their bodies in a swastika pattern on the football field (and photographed it!) several months ago. My point isn't that either of these crimes is acceptable, but that people tend to be irrational and ignorant of statistical analysis. Both of these are good schools with better than average student outcomes, but families consistently bring their own prejudices into analysis and it creates mild chaos & havoc across the system overall.
I run a dual boot of windows and am currently dauly-driving CachyOS quite happily. I've been playing some Crimson desert and got some occasional crashes... But any other game I have has run smoothly.
Their GUI tools for package management are thin wrappers on CLI tools, but are enough hand-holding that most people should navigate it fine. More devices worked out of the box for my with Linux than Windows.
Just like if you haven't tried AI in a year and have mocked it, you need to try it again. Of you haven't tried Linux desktop in a few years, you need to try again. CachyOS really does seem to handle the driver installs and gaming compatibility well.
Anthropic has raised $64B in total since they were founded.
Even if you say we are going to measure profit in the very special hacker news way of looking at money taken in from customer revenue against money invested and we say they can't do things like counting building data centers or buying GPUs as capital expenses and instead have to count them against profit then in 2 years time they will have made more money than they have taken in investment.
Business idea - Iran Bitcoin fee intermediary. Realistically the CIA will handle this for US companies and maybe allies until they figure something out.
I'd actually argue it has some wicked problem characteristics. The input space is enormous (all possible audio), perception is subjective and nonlinear, and there's no objective function to optimize against, only "does this feel right?". Every solution you try reframes what "good" means. It's not as hard as social planning but is way harder than it sounds, no pun intended.
What is to stop the ships from lying ? I wonder if Iran will do spot check of some ships to prevent this. And will boarding ships cause Trump to have yet another breakdown ?
You can just look at examples like Knuth Claude’s cycles that solved the problem. I have no doubt that if Claude didn’t exist perhaps Knuth would come up with a solution anyways, but given a limited amount of time/patience Claude came up with a solution while Knuth did not. That’s what I meant here.
Similarly the problems I give to Claude are also in that category where I myself did not come up with a solution within a set amount of time, and instead of keep working on it manually I decided to give them to Claude.
Java Minecraft has always been super transparent. I remember being shocked when I signed up for their early modding SDK prior to Microsoft and it was literally just the source code for Minecraft that I could compile against.
