I have two niche blogs( civilwhiz.com and mes100.com). Those bot traffics increase my visitor count in Google analytics by more than 100%. It's super annoying when the analytics are distorted by bots traffic.
One thing I’m curious about is this: Ilya Sutskever wants to build Safe Superintelligence, but he keeps his company and research very secretive.
Given that building Safe Superintelligence is extraordinarily difficult — and no single person’s ideas or talents could ever be enough — how does secrecy serve that goal?
If he (or his employees) are actually exploring genuinely new, promising approaches to AGI, keeping them secret helps avoid a breakneck arms race like the one LLM vendors are currently engaged in.
Situations like that do not increase all participants' level of caution.
Doesn't sound like you listened to the interview. He addresses this and says he may make releases that would be otherwise held back because he believes it's important for developments to be seen by the public.
No reasonable person would do that! That is, if you had the key to AI, you wouldn't share it and you would do everything possible to prevent it's dissemination. Meanwhile you would use it to conquer the world! Bwahahahaaaah!
Case 1:
You're a high performer, one year into the role. A colleague, who's been around longer but struggled, gets promoted not necessarily on merit, but on their ability to manage up. Your early contributions are quietly absorbed into their promotion case. Once they step into a managerial role, the dynamics shift. Unless you stay quiet and compliant, you’re suddenly less welcome in the team.
Case 2: High Performers:
Some managers (even partners) feel threatened when team members build credibility with clients. I’ve seen situations where a client repeatedly requesting a specific consultant backfired on that consultant. At year-end reviews, client recognition turned into a liability, not an asset.
Credit Allocation:In some Big 4 setups, CRM credit allocation is less about contribution and more about visibility and tagging. Accounts are assigned to partners who may not actively engage, yet receive full credit. Technical sales teams, who drive actual deals but don't "own" accounts, often find their impact diluted. In some cases, partners even tag themselves as "owners" of said accounts mid-pursuit to claim credit post-close. At the year end, the actual deal closers are usually running around begging partners for credit. You might end up getting 30% of what you actually closed. This works well for partners as incentives outflow is reduced leaving money on the table.
Event Marketing Shell Game:
Large-format partner-led events in places like Goa or Dubai are positioned as knowledge exchange and brainstorming events. Behind the scene Sales teams are pushed hard to invite prospects where the engagement has been going on for months. When those deals close weeks/months later, the event organizers often claim the outcome; regardless of who did the heavy lifting.
>>You're a high performer, one year into the role. A colleague, who's been around longer but struggled, gets promoted not necessarily on merit, but on their ability to manage up.
Its honestly mostly like a queue, you can't see why people who came before should get a early exit. But those people had people before them too, and thought the same. Now that you arrived, you think your specific case be prioritised above them for merits you think count above theirs and not necessarily their place in the queue.
As much as we all think we are special, we mostly aren't, time and queue position plays a huge role in most things in the society.
Its pointless to fight the queue system, most events in life happen in an order, and its pointless to fight cause-effect sequences. Some exceptions to this absolutely exist, but this is the general rule.
>>At year-end reviews, client recognition turned into a liability, not an asset.
Do not outshine the master - 48 laws of power
Remember the system is a part of the game, if you threaten someone you will take their job, its in their interest now to see through the end of you.
More like Dave has been pushing up sacks of really valuable things up a hill, for years.
Jack who just arrived and pushed ONE sack up slightly faster than Dave, in the first week, thinks he must be promoted above Dave right then and there. Or its oppression.
To start with accept this thing first. Its human fallacy to confuse making rapid changes to a process as making fast progress. In reality sticking to one thing for long is what brings the big progress.
You might want to talk to martial arts people, stock investors/traders, musicians, surgeons, or anyone for that matter.
Someone who shows up on the 10001th morning, is not the same as some one who showed up on the 100th morning, even if the latter is some performing better creating a his own personal local maxima.
Very good retort. I will insist both things happen and our views on it probably come down to life experience and current position.
I've too often seen Dave praised for carrying sacks day in day out instead of placing them on the goddamn conveyor belt. Some have come to doubt the conveyor belts utility when we could all just be carrying the sacks. In fact if we got rid of the conveyor belt we could hire our cousin and brother-in-law to be cool like Dave.
I want to be proven wrong, but I feel that demographic collapse is the single biggest crisis facing the developed world today. In this regard, the US is actually doing better than East Asian countries and Europe, but the trend is unmistakable — modern, affluent states are committing voluntary suicide because their citizens are simply not willing to have children.
Generally, populations with higher birth rates come from poorer countries or communities with lower living standards. Israel is the only major exception, but once you analyze the social strata it becomes clear why: higher-income groups still have lower fertility than the religious ones (especially the ultra-Orthodox and Arab Muslims) by a wide margin, even though the higher-income groups still have higher birth rates than other OECD countries. This creates long-term strains on society.
Another interesting fact is that groups with higher socioeconomic status (SES) tend to have lower birth rates. If SES correlates with IQ, then there’s an uncomfortable but politically incorrect implication: the smarter groups are having fewer children, while the less advantaged groups are having more. A few generations later, it’s not hard to see where this leads — human intelligence may trend downward. That is simply evolution at work.
Climate change, wars, pandemics, and natural disasters won’t wipe out humanity; we’ve survived all of those and recovered. But demographic collapse driven by high living standards is new territory, and I am genuinely, deeply worried.
You can have a spiral of bad economic decisionmaking through demographic biases in natalism, but that's likely to be a product of cultural transmission, not of any biological property of intelligence, which is mean-reverting and only dubiously and marginally correlated with genetic variation.
Which is to say, you can make the point you're making without going out on a politically (and probably scientifically) incorrect limb.
Yes thank you. The concept of Natural Selection has a lot more dependencies and complications than typically attributed. Especially for a complex outcome like “intelligence” or economic success.
Demographic collapse paired with high fertility for scientifically illiterate religious groups (Like the amish, who have a fertility rate of over 6) might still pair terribly with climate change driven by positive feedback loops (like methane leaking from thawing permafrost). We'll lose the technological and state capacity needed to mitigate & adapt while the global climate slowly trends towards an uninhabitable equilibrium.
China is now encouraging higher birth rates after many years of the one-child policy. But the general consensus is that it hasn’t been very successful, even with the CCP’s authoritarian power. The causes are multi-dimensional and difficult to solve: high living costs, changing social values, and younger generations who no longer want to marry young—or marry at all.
Even North Korea has to encourage women to give birth[0]; the Kim dynasty can’t simply issue an order and shoot anyone who disobeys. It simply doesn’t work that way.
The CCP has not really exercised its authoritarian power to raise birth rates yet because it's not a big enough problem and might never become one.
The birth rate fell in North Korea because people are genuinely starving, whereas in other places it's mostly because of birth control. These are not comparable situations.
A Civil 3D plugin (Genabler) that will include all the network catalogs and collate the Civil 3D styles for civil engineers to use.
There are some out-of-the-box catalogs and styles shipped with the default installation, but they are quite limited and fairly well hidden—which is not surprising, given that Civil 3D is a huge beast. As a result, they are not commonly used.
When people think about Civil 3D, they often assume it requires BIM modelers (in a sense, just glorified drafters) to create all the necessary catalogs and styles, and to assist with their use.
My Civil 3D plugin will:
1. Make standard, market-compliant catalogs and polished styles available to engineers at large. Think of it as the WordPress theme provider equivalent.
2. Make the entire process easy and painless through the plugin, with prominent buttons for quick access.
If the plugin is done well, there will be less need for BIM modelers, since for a fee, engineers could simply purchase catalogs and styles that are so easy to use they require no technical training.
As a side benefit, I also get to explore how LLMs can help me write code. It has been a while since I last updated my AI usage policy [0], and I look forward to revisiting it.
It's a shame that the top comments are focusing more on Elon Musk, his personality and politics rather than the quality of the model per se.
Speaking about Elon, regardless of what you think of him, he really does get things done, despite naysayers -- SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and even get Trump elected ( despite subsequent fallout) etc. Even Twitter is finding a second life by becoming a haven for the free speech advocates and alternative views, much to the chagrin of MSMs because they now no longer have the monopoly on the "truth", and censoring "fake news" becomes hard.
People like Elon are almost by definition contrarian ( you don't change the world by being a conformist), that should align well with the predilection of the intended audience here. So it's a surprise to me that HNs are almost uniformly, vehemently anti-Musk. It's almost as if the ultimate embodiment of the hacker spirit -- Musk -- is being rejected by his own kind, the very kind that he is supposed to inspire.
> Even Twitter is finding a second life by becoming a haven for the free speech advocates and alternative views, much to the chagrin of MSMs because they now no longer have the monopoly on the "truth"
Of all the silly things to say about Musk and Twitter, the idea that “MSM” are upset about Twitter is among the silliest.
In my understanding of the hacker ethos, hackers appear to be genuinely nice people who mean to do good for society and regular people. Elon does not align with those values according to some people so they reject him and his activities.
Accusing a cave diver who made Elon look stupid to be a pedophile just because Elon can’t stand people not thinking he is the smartest? Can give more examples.
Besides the obvious right wing interference in politics, star link weaponization in some countries - how can anybody stomach the saving-humanity-agenda while running a major social media unresponsiveliy without caring of moderation, its consequences for real people?
I think the lack of moderation is a feature not a bug. People actually get to express themselves freely, very unlike the sterile feeling you get from mainstream social media, with content engineered for maximum engagement and political correctness for maximum ad revenue.
Because someone's moderation is censorship to someone else. Begging Musk for free speech is another issue in itself though so you better don't bet on X allowing you to speak forever.
Free speech is one of these things that is always used as a trojan for doing ultimate good.
Let us empower anybody to say anything they want AND enforce everybody to have to listen to it.
Anonymous free speech is not free speech. There is no accountability. It should not should not be a human right. Its destroying our societies. The evidence should be clear by now.
Say what you will about Stalin, but he really did win World War II and liberate his people from the yoke of fascism. Say what you will about the Kim family, but they really stood up to the world’s greatest superpower and held their own. Say what you will about Pol Pot, but he gave everyone an appreciation for rural life.
People, if you’re going to start a sentence hero worshipping an asshole with “say what you will”, you have to realise that anyone can be lionised, no matter how they are. No one with any sense thinks Elon Musk is a good person and you’re not convincing anyone with your “say what you will”.
But Tesla != Musk. He wasn't actually a founder, he bought his way in, and demanded that everyone agree he was a "founder".
Not to mention the huge numbers of real scientists working over the decades to improve battery tech to the point where it was obvious that electric cars were going to be viable.
We shouldn't praise Musk for taking credit for other people's work.
Really? Most of the stuff he promised never materialized. Elon's genius is that he learned where the money comes from. Both Tesla and Space X where financed by gov. money. That's why he supported Trump and that's why he keeps pumping the stock. He goes directly to the source.
I feel that demographic collapse is the single biggest crisis facing the developed world now. In this regard US is actually doing better than East Asia countries and Europe, but still, the trend is unmistakable -- modern, affluent states are commiting voluntarily suicide because their citizens are not too willing in giving birth.
All the climate change problems, wars, pandemics and natural disasters won't devastate human simply because we been through all those and we recovered. But demographic collapse because of high living standard? It's uncharted territory here and I am really, really worry.
> modern, affluent states are commiting voluntarily suicide because their citizens are not too willing in giving birth
Phrase things with the blame assigned accordingly. Your phrasing blames people for not becoming parents. A more accurate phrasing is '....because their wealthy elites are so greedy they make having children unaffordable'
"Demographic collapse" is because people can't afford rent, can't afford food, can't afford healthcare - childbirth is ABSURDLY expensive in the US, can't afford childcare, and so many other things.
Why is that? Because of greed. More and more of everything is swallowed up by private equity and corporate management who have no empathy, no flexibility, only a demand for eternal growth. The human piece is irrelevant and actively undesirable. Far simpler to just pay for some GPUs and write articles blaming ordinary people for having no more options.
Scandinavian countries are commonly listed as a counter-example to what you say. Those countries have strong social safety nets for everyone, and their citizens' basic needs are covered. Child care costs are not an issue for them. Yet, their fertility rates are also too low.
Thus, to the extent that costs and money play a role, it does not seem to be a decisive one. There is something else going on.
Does that include housing? I went and read the Swedish Wikipedia birth rate article (Födelsetal), but couldn't find any clues. Social norms, that's about all.
Presumably the worrying thing here is a possible boom-and-bust cycle. In the long view it should be self-limiting, if a small population with lots of space tends to fill it with a larger future population that then reproduces less. It's just unpleasant to be caught at the declining stage of that cycle, with abundant old people.
US real household income is probably 3x higher than during the baby boom. How could they have afford to have had kids back then? Moreover, people have always been greedy. Yet birth rates have only started dropping more recently.
I would surmise it’s the opposite cause, people are wealthier now and so kids are less desirable because the opportunity cost is higher.
>How could they have afford to have had kids back then?
Most families had only one person working, and one available for childcare. Housing was dramatically cheaper. So was a university education. So was food.
And no - unregulated capitalistic greed has dramatically accelerated in the last few decades. It hasn't always been this way. Corporations are buying up everything so they can extract rent and using algorithms and regulatory control to extract every possible dime. Where before you might rent a small home from a landlord who would understand if you were laid off and had to skip a month or two (and who might not raise rents every year) now you have an apartment owned by equity using software to talk to all the other landlords and fix prices as high as possible who will file eviction if you're a minute late.
Only in the middle classes does opportunity cost come in. Today, the wealthiest and the poorest have beyond-replacement fertility. Race becomes a factor in America, but the only group of women with higher fertility in the middle class are foreign-born.
Then why more affluent younger people have no plan to have kids? The under 35 who have a partner at my work are just planning their next trip. They don't want to hear anything about kids and their constraints.
They will give you reasons like over population, environnemental collapse etc... I think they are very self centered and don't want to make sacrifices
Costs are out of control. I know families where both parents were big tech SWEs and one quit their job because losing that huge salary was about the same cost as childcare.
Exactly. How do we expect parents with multiple lower income jobs to manage this at all. We don’t have universal childcare and Reaganites fucked us with the nuclear family bullshit.
> think they are very self centered and don't want to make sacrifices
How dare they not want to spend decades doing something they don't want at enormous personal and financial cost just to keep your favorite economic pyramid scheme running. So selfish.
Here's an idea: if you want kids so much, pay for them. Provide universal healthcare, childcare, education. Provide food stamps for everyone under 18. Put your money where your mouth is.
If those people expect to continue to live on after they retire, then all the products and services they rely on in that stage of life will be performed by the children of their peers, the ones who had them at enormous personal and financial cost. They are externalizing the costs of there being people to make the economy work in their old age to others so they can take more trips. In fairness, if you don't have kids you should have to pay higher taxes (enormously higher in fact to get close to making up the difference). Those taxes get re-directed to childcare for those that need it. Fair?
> if you don't have kids you should have to pay higher taxes
We do actually have this today in the US through policies like the earned income tax credit, child/dependent care tax credit, and child tax credit, which primarily reduce taxes for people with children (and therefore put a relatively higher tax burden on childless people).
There’s also a large tax credit for adoption costs. I wonder if GP comment would result in more births, or something like H1B arrangements for personal tax reasons.
As a US citizen, why on earth would I bring a new innocent child into this modern capitalist christian nationalist hellscape? We just had to have a judge force the government to fund food stamps for another month for fucks sake. I would be more likely to adopt because the child already exists and needs love and care.
We adopted. So many things today are in opposition to Christ’s teachings. The politicization of helping the poor. The individual reaction to problems by wanting so much wealth that those problems don’t apply to me.
Adoption is costly but for now there’s a tax credit. And I suspect every company would like to have the kind of employee who adopts. Some will pay large proportions of the cost, but not the median employer.
That's part of the problem, but the trend is universal, so it's not only that. I think that reduction of human population is good, but we need to rethink our economic models entirely, which nobody is doing, at least not seriously enough
> Phrase things with the blame assigned accordingly. Your phrasing blames people for not becoming parents. A more accurate phrasing is '....because their wealthy elites are so greedy they make having children unaffordable'
OP has identified the problem more accurately than you have, though.
AI is a symptom, not a cause. We have to fill the labor gap with immigrants and AI because people are having fewer children.
Do you think modern institutions are less efficient at suppressing human greed than medieval ones? Obviously they are more efficient.
The problem you mention is not the wealthy elite, but rather the unproductive parasites, rich and poor. And this is a somewhat separate problem from the birth rate collapse. Indeed, it doesn't help the birth rate, but it's also not the main reason people aren't having children. The main reason is people wanting to have sex without having children, and we've given everyone the ability to do so with the birth control pill.
Technology has enabled greed and exploitation to increase exponentially. The ability to regulate it has been slashed at every opportunity - such as cutting funding to the IRS.
Natural selection will fix this in no time, as the genes and cultures that lead to people not making kids die off. Widespread availability of contraceptives and abortion is recent enough that we just haven't had the time to adapt yet. The desire to have sex has been enough to keep birth rate high for most of human history. Now evolution is strongly selecting for cultures and genes that lead to more kids even in the presence of birth control. In a few of generations we'll start seeing birth rates recover.
I am not sure will all culture remain immune to the "curse" of modern comfortable lives that lead to low birthrates. This remains unproven.
And based on current trend it seems that it's the most religious group ( Islamists, Orthodox Jews) who props up the birthrates. But they are also economically most unproductive and most anti-science ones, so I really unsure where this will lead us.
The trend is universal because birth control is becoming universal. The only places that still have high birth rates are places where birth control isn't easily available (and religious cultures). It could be driven by other factors as well, but I'm betting it's mostly just birth control. We don't have a very strong innate desire to have kids, it is the desire for sex that human reproduction has mostly relied on. We're only a couple of generations into birth control, so we're only now starting to feel the effect.
I think you’d lose that bet. Women die in childbirth regularly. And it’s not birth control but our stratospheric advances against infant mortality that most strongly influence population dynamics.
What's fascinating to me about this shift is that I've yet to see a clearly identified root cause. Some people on the left identify cost of living and things like that, but we're generally richer and better off than ever and still having fewer kids. In fact higher standards of living seem generally negatively correlated with number of children. Some people on the right blame birth control or women not knowing their place or whatever, but it seems odd that propagation of a species would rely on essentially forced participation of prospective parents.
Given those things, I wonder if there is an actual problem here or we just don't have the experience to see how it resolves. It's hard to see the side effects of increased standards and living or more choice and equality for women as inherently bad or something we need to fight against, especially when there seem to be few effective solutions that are compatible with a free and modern society.
> Some people on the right blame birth control or women not knowing their place or whatever, but it seems odd that propagation of a species would rely on essentially forced participation of prospective parents.
The simple explanation is that there is no local "cost" to doubling your household's income. The only thing you "pay" is to have fewer children. As smaller households become more competitive, average costs rise and the only way to stay competitive is for other households to also stay small.
Looking at world-wide graphs and it's extremely worrying - many countries are completely upside-down and over the next 25-50 years as the elderly die, these populations will crash.
IMO governments should have started doing something about 20 years ago if they wanted to keep things on-track, I suspect the children of today are just going to have to suffer the consequences of a large population decrease.
It's certainly plausible that this is all for the best for Earth's sustainability, but I expect the coming years to be turbulent nonetheless.
> IMO governments should have started doing something about 20 years ago if they wanted to keep things on-track...
I guess my thought is that it's non-obvious what "doing something" would have looked like. The seemingly inevitable outcome of economic, social, and technological progress has been declining birthrates, and many proposed solutions would effectively involve reversing one of those three things. I'm honestly not sure that would be a better outcome. I'd welcome a more palatable alternative, but it's not clear one will be forthcoming.
We aren't supposed to think of children as an economic good. For one children don't pay money for their care so it's difficult for capital to exploit the relationship. Unpaid work especially done by women is valued at zero. Or seen as a sunk cost.
If we reject that than we see that it takes similar amounts of time and labor to raise children as it did a 100 years ago. Other resources have increased. Particularly raising children in an urban environment costs more than rural. And unlike rural children's labor has no value in urban environments. That totally sets up cost disease.
I've been thinking along the lines of generalized Malthusian limits it's not just malnutrition and disease that limits population growth. Toss in cost disease and you can argue for urban, capitalist industrial economies we've overshot some nebulous limit that doesn't show up in mortality statistics.
It's a problem we chose to create for ourselves by inventing and socially normalizing 99% effective birth control. We've given ourselves the freedom to make the choice to have children consciously, but not without consequences, some of which have already caught up to us.
In the past, natural selection had no reason to distinguish between the drive to have sex and the drive to have children because they have the same effect. If we abruptly take away the former as a reliable enough mechanism to propagate the species, we should expect much fewer children. And that is exactly what happened when the pill was introduced a few decades ago: it cut the birth rate in half in developed countries almost instantly.
If we wanted to ameliorate the demographic issues caused by this, we just have to restrict the supply and availability of birth control pills and similar surefire methods like IUDs, just enough such that the birth rate is pegged at 2.1 children per woman.
But this is difficult to achieve in democratic societies because the people that want sex without reproduction make up a significant portion of the population. But we have to fill the labor gap somehow. The solutions we've come up with are mass immigration, and soon, AI. Of course, these solutions create new problems that we'll have to deal with later, but such is life.
We don't, but the point is that it's only one part of the entire system. If you have a (human-supplied) scoring function, then even completely random mutations can serve as a mechanism to optimize: you generate a bunch, keep the better ones according to the scoring function and repeat. That would be a very basic genetic algorithm.
The LLM serves to guide the search more "intelligently" so that mutations aren't actually random but can instead draw from what the LLM "knows".
In this case AlphaEvolve doesn't write proofs, it uses the LLM to write Python code (or any language, really) that produces some numerical inputs to a problem.
They just try out the inputs on the problem they care about. If the code gives better results, they keep it around. They actually keep a few of the previous versions that worked well as inspiration for the LLM.
If the LLM is hallucinating nonsense, it will just produce broken code that gives horrible results, and that idea will be thrown away.
The final evaluation is performed with a deterministic tool that's specialized for the current domain. It doesn't care that it's getting its input from a LLM that may be allucinating.
The catch however is that this approach can only be applied to areas where you can have such an automated verification tool.
Google's system is like any other optimizer, where you have a scoring function, and you keep altering the function's inputs to make the scoring function return a big number.
The difference here is the function's inputs are code instead of numbers, which makes LLMs useful because LLMs are good at altering code. So the LLM will try different candidate solutions, then Google's system will keep working on the good ones and throw away the bad ones (colloquially, "branch is cut").
Exactly, he even mentioned that it's a variant of traditional optimization tool so it's not surprising to see cutting-plane methods and when the structure allows; benders decomposition
The LLM basically just produces some code that either runs and produces good results or it doesn't. If it produces garbage, that is the end of the line for that branch.
New York is always deep blue, so what is the significance of a Democrat winning this time?
What is perhaps more telling is that the Democrats are putting up such a far-left candidate to the extent that even Obama can't endorse Zohran Mamdani's self-described 'democratic socialist' platform.
Republicans (or a former republican running as an independent) have won 5 of the last 9 NYC Mayoral elections. Mamdani will be the third democratic mayor elected since the 80s.
I have two niche blogs( civilwhiz.com and mes100.com). Those bot traffics increase my visitor count in Google analytics by more than 100%. It's super annoying when the analytics are distorted by bots traffic.
reply