On the other hand we'll probably see a lot more fully vibecoded projects gaining traction, because of the rate at which they can move once human design and review gets taken out of the equation.
For example, I recently came across Hucre, https://github.com/productdevbook/hucre, which is a JS spreadsheet library apparently developed entirely in the past few months and which has already gained 2.2k GH stars.
Is it any good? Who knows, but the alternatives for spreadsheet handling in JS aren't great, either being limited, semi-commercial, or unmaintained. And creating a new one without LLM-assistance is a huge, painful, mostly thankless undertaking. It's not surprising that a zero-dependency option that promises to do everything this can do would be popular.
Everyone has had the experience of butting their head against functionality limitations of open-source libraries. Fully vibecoded libraries will be able to add functionality at a rate that human-authored ones can't. Code quality might suffer, but if a library has a feature you need, and you've got a deadline to hit, are you going to avoid using it? Is the average developer? Or the average LLM?
I think we're about to hit an interesting period of human-only projects competing with vibecoded ones, and it'll be an acid test as to whether the pro and anti claims about AI-coding bear out in terms of code reliably.
Unless they roll-back women's rights and improvements in child mortality, societies will need to radically overhaul their entire relationship to supporting parenthood in order to reverse this trend. The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high.
We need universal childcare services, provided by the state and available to all, and other childcare-enabling reforms like automatic right to work from home and other flexible working arrangements for those with children.
These won't be popular with everyone, but you'll won't solve the demographic crisis without them.
> societies will need to radically overhaul their entire relationship to supporting parenthood in order to reverse this trend.
Absolutely impossible to do in the modern age, not just in India.
Everyone is set in their lifestyle.
This reason and cost of living crisis + AI + pollution + lack of any support whatsoever is causing this baby bust but govt thinks it van give a one time $ 300 money grant for the 3rd kid! It takes about $ 1.5k to get delivery done in a good hospital in the cities. Checkup and pre delivery costs are above $ 500 at the least over 8 months.
Birth rates have been falling worldwide, regardless of the level of government support. It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children.
> The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high
Nope. My wife and I have 4 children, on a lower-middle-class income in the US. Your lifestyle choices matter a lot. If you want to have children, you can find a way to afford them.
The worse the primary-caregiver's job prospects are, the cheaper the opportunity costs are to have kids. My wife quickly realized she didn't want to be an English teacher, and couldn't do a whole lot of other things with that degree, so her staying home to raise our 4 kids was very affordable for us. If she had been a software developer, the opportunity costs would have been higher.
Sounds more like it's a matter of attitudes about personal economics than attitudes about having children. If you want to wallow in poverty (and don't mind if your children do as well), then of course you can "find a way."
As per usual arrangement, the internet can't stand a nuanced opinion, but instead jumps straight to extreme conclusions. Nowhere did I say anything about wallowing in poverty.
Of course, "If you want to have children, you can find a way to afford them." is a very nuanced statement for you to have made.
4 kids on a lower-middle-class income in the US makes me picture poverty, as someone on a lower-middle-class income whose girlfriend is legally in poverty (and with that being the primary reason we haven't gotten married and had kids yet). If you disagree, feel free to describe your circumstances in more nuanced detail. I wonder if it will really end up being a description of lower-middle-class.
> It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children.
That is the story right there. We as a society spent decades upon decades demonizing having children at a young-ish age. "Your career is more important", they said. We got shows like "16 and Pregnant" to dissuade viewers from having children. People have become genuinely afraid of having kids.
Not until you are in your 30s does the social messaging shift from "only failures have children" to "why haven't you had a child yet?" That change in social pressure often compels one to start to change their mind, but at that point one becomes biologically limited in how many children they can reasonably birth.
There's a certain other country that has free education, free healthcare, free childcare, heavy tax subsidies for having children, has the highest birthrates in the region, and it's all paid for with American tax dollars.
>but you'll won't solve the demographic crisis without them.
you won't solve it with them either. all of that feel good crap would bump the TFR of an average civilized country by 0.2. how can you have access to all the data in the world and still believe that the reasons are economical and not cultural?
I agree it's primarily cultural. I wonder whether there's anything that a non-totalitarian government can do that would significantly change the cultural side of it.
I don't think even totalitarian governments can do anything about it now. with few exceptions, the only places on Earth with TFR above replacement are undeveloped countries or underdeveloped areas within developed countries. what could China or Russia even do, undeveloped themselves? dismantle their cities and uneducate their people?
Communist Romania did it simply by outlawing all forms of contraception. TFR jumped from 1.9 to 3.7, nurseries were very busy, and the rivers were full of dead unwanted babies (as that is the thing humans seem to be hardwired to want to do with unwanted babies). It didn't last as people found ways to get contraception anyway within a few years.
banning contraception in the present time would have even less impact. the percentage of single/never married fertile age adults today is much higher than it was in communist-era Romania. "NCFMR analyses of ASEC Current Population Survey, 2022" says 73% of men and 65% of women among 18-29 in the US.
it is however one of those "stick" things both totalitarian and non-totalitarian countries will inevitably attempt at some point in near future, now that it's clear that none of the "carrot" things make any fucking difference. likely not with outright bans, not even in China, but by artificially limiting availability and raising prices of condoms and pills with tax. like the rest of those things, it will predictably have little to no positive effect.
The author apparently wrote a book arguing that “near death experiences” prove there probably is an afterlife. I’m not sure he’s in any position to be lecturing anyone about delusions.
AI company leaders didn't invent this concern about the potential dangers of AI, either as a cause of economic disruption, or as a potential extinction risk. Superintelligence was published in 2014, and even then it wasn't a new topic. Technologists, philosophers and science fiction authors have been discussing and speculating about AI risk for decades.
Also, the idea that AI leadership seized on and amplified these concerns purely for marketing purposes isn't plausible. If you're attempting to market a new product to a mass audience, talking about how dangerous and potentially world-ending it is is the most insane strategy you could choose. Any advantage in terms of getting people's attention is going to be totally outweighed by the huge negative associations you are creating in the minds of people who you want to use your product, and the likelihood of bringing unwanted scrutiny and regulation to your nascent industry.
(Can you imagine the entire railroad industry saying, "Our new trains are so fast, if they crash everybody on board will die! And all the people in the surrounding area will die! It'll be a catastrophe!" They would not do this. The rational strategy is to underplay the risks and attempt to reassure people. Even more so if you think genuinely believe the risks are being overstated.)
Occam's razor suggests that when the AI industry warned about AI risk they believed what they were saying. They had a new, rapidly advancing technology, and absent practical experience of its dangers they referred to pre-existing discussions on the topic, and concluded it was potentially very risky. And so they talked about them in order to prepare the ground in case they turned out to be true. If you warn about AI causing mass unemployment, and then it actually does so, perhaps you can shift the blame to the governments who didn't pay attention and implement social policies to mitigate the effects.
I don't think the AI industry deserve too much of our sympathy, but there is a definite "damned if you do, damned if you don't aspect" to AI safety. If they underplay it, they will get accused of ignoring the risks, and if they talk about it, they get accused scaremongering if the worst doesn't happen.
>If you're attempting to market a new product to a mass audience, talking about how dangerous and potentially world-ending it is is the most insane strategy you could choose.
except that isn't the segment of the market they're targeting. They're trying to FOMO businesses into paying them, and the businesses play along in part because they (the businesses) don't care about morals nearly as much as the potential profit (sure, a train that kills everyone on board is bad for the people on board, but just think about how efficient shipping will be) and in part because they're scared that by not doing so they'll end up on the business end of how dangerous these new models supposedly are
Another important angle is that the ire of the public falls specifically on people. Google is stepping on the gas just as hard as the other AI companies, but they don't have an uncharismatic CEO drawing in tons of hatred and scrutiny.
We live in an age where influential companies with notable figureheads are seen as evil incarnate and influential companies without notable figureheads as, well, you know, the same old same old greedy companies. It just so happens that the most influential AI companies have notable figureheads, so almost everybody fucking hates them and thinks they're up to no good (whatever they do). Truth is that for most of those companies, taking away the influence of their hated CEO and doing away with their ramblings will change absolutely nothing about how that company operates.
Very well put and I think that covers pretty much everything that needs to be said here.
In fact it has been AI people who have been leading discussions around AI ethics and the dangers of AI since 1955. This is not new and it is consistent.
The new thing is that the average person is now entering into the debate around AI; And like pretty much everything else in the public sphere doing it with entirely no context.
I always love when some total novice encounters a problem in a well studied field as though they’re the first one to encounter it. There’s nothing more narcissistic than some person thinking they are unique in their position with absolutely no demonstration of having done their homework on whether or not this is an established topic in an established field.
That’s where I place 99.9999% of people who are opening their mouth on this topic.
Most of the builders don’t care about this mess and are continuing to work like usual.
My understand was that was in relation to IP licensing. Microsoft got access to anything OpenAI built unless they declared they had developed AGI. This new article apparently unlinks revenue sharing from technology progress, but it's unclear to me if it changes the situation regarding IP if OpenAI (claim to) have achieved AGI.
That’s why you need filler words that contribute little to the sentence meaning but give it a chance to compute/think. This is part of why humans do the same when speaking.
The LLM has no accessible state beyond its own output tokens; each pass generates a single token and does not otherwise communicate with subsequent passes. Therefore all information calculated in a pass must be encoded into the entropy of the output token. If the only output of a thinking pass is a dumb filler word with hardly any entropy, then all the thinking for that filler word is forgotten and cannot be reconstructed.
Do you have any evidence at all of this? I know how LLMs are trained and this makes no sense to me. Otherwise you'd just put filler words in every input
e.g. instead of: "The square root of 256 is" you'd enter "errr The er square um root errr of 256 errr is" and it would miraculously get better? The model can't differentiate between words you entered and words it generated its self...
It's why it starts with "You're absolutely right!" It's not to flatter the user. It's a cheap way to guide the response in a space where it's utilizing the correction.
Something they don’t seem to mention in the article: Does greater model “enjoyment” of a task correspond to higher benchmark performance? E.g. if you steer it to enjoy solving difficult programming tasks, does it produce better solutions?
Pretty easy to test, I’d imagine, on a local LLM that exposes internals.
I’d suspect that the signals for enjoyment being injected in would lead towards not necessarily better but “different” solutions.
Right now I’m thinking of it in terms of increasing the chances that the LLM will decide to invest further effort in any given task.
Performance enhancement through emotional steering definitely seems in the cards, but it might show up mostly through reducing emotionally-induced error categories rather than generic “higher benchmark performance”.
If someone came along and pissed you off while you were working, you’d react differently than if someone came along and encouraged you while you were working, right?
If you think training a sparse autoencoder to extract concept vectors that are usable as steering injections into a modern LLM is pretty easy, you should probably go work for Anthropic's mech interp team ;)
Anti-AI articles like this seem to be the new "Doing my part to resist big tech: Why I'm switching back from Chrome to Firefox" genre that popped up on HN for a decade or so. If it makes you feel better, great, but don't kid yourself that your actions will make any difference whatsoever to the overall trajectory of AI adoption in IT or society.
This genre has always been very prevalent on HN. Move from cloud to on-premise. Move away from US-based services. Move away from Gmail. Move away from Github.
While it's relevant to the particular submission, this type of comment is thrown around way too often.
Me boycotting some company's product due to bad practices (slavery, etc).
Response: You know your boycotting isn't going to change anything, right?
Me: Yes, and ....? I'm not trying to change the world.
I don't use FF as some form of protest. It's just a browser I like more.
I'm not anti-AI the way much of HN is, but let's pretend I am. If I ban AI generated content on my site[1], I'm not trying to change the world. Just controlling my site.
Getting more to your sentiment: The world/Internet is a vast place. If even 1000 people think like me, it's more than enough. For a number of years I had valuable online interactions via BBS's with a population < 1000. As long as I get 1000 people, let the rest of the world burn!
It's like the constant "Emacs is dying" threads we used to have on HN, because the percentage of SO users using it kept dropping. When in reality, the absolute numbers kept increasing. Who cares if the world has moved on to VS Code? Emacs as an ecosystem was/is thriving!
[1] Assuming I live in a fantasy world where I can classify content accurately...
I think much of current day neuroticism can be attributed to insincere comparisons of genuinely normal trade offs (like AI) to slavery in the past.
I think people are so afraid to do a hecking racism that they start comparing any normal thing to racism. I also think there’s an incentive here: by comparing to racism they potentially gain some social status points like - I’m more morally superior to you because I didn’t do a hecking racism like you.
But it can backfire, like with your comment. People are catching up to how ridiculous this comparison is
> don't kid yourself that your actions will make any difference whatsoever to the overall trajectory of AI adoption in IT or society
How large does a group have to be (absolute number or percentage of population) for you to change your mind on this?
Serious question - genuinely curious. My answer is about 10% provided they are organised in some way. 5% if you're particularly good at collective action.
Plus many of these articles seem maximized to attract attention on social media, which is its own machine.
Posting your most provocative and strong opinions in reaction to the latest controversy-of-the-week is what fuels the internet and culture more than anything these days. The attention economy demands hot takes mixed with preaching about every new thing.
Responsive accordions are actually solved using CSS nowadays, but plenty of other things aren't, and the web has definitely needed an API or library like this for a long, long time. So it's great that we now have it.
Building something like this was certainly possible before, but it was a lot of effort. What's changed is simple: AI. It seems clear this library was mostly built in Cursor using an agent. That's not a criticism, it's a perfect use of AI to build something that we couldn't before.
> it's a perfect use of AI to build something that we couldn't before.
There's no reason why it couldn't have been built before. This is something that probably should exist as standard functionality, like what the Canvas API already includes. It's pretty basic functionality that every text renderer would include already at a lower level.
For example, I recently came across Hucre, https://github.com/productdevbook/hucre, which is a JS spreadsheet library apparently developed entirely in the past few months and which has already gained 2.2k GH stars.
Is it any good? Who knows, but the alternatives for spreadsheet handling in JS aren't great, either being limited, semi-commercial, or unmaintained. And creating a new one without LLM-assistance is a huge, painful, mostly thankless undertaking. It's not surprising that a zero-dependency option that promises to do everything this can do would be popular.
Everyone has had the experience of butting their head against functionality limitations of open-source libraries. Fully vibecoded libraries will be able to add functionality at a rate that human-authored ones can't. Code quality might suffer, but if a library has a feature you need, and you've got a deadline to hit, are you going to avoid using it? Is the average developer? Or the average LLM?
I think we're about to hit an interesting period of human-only projects competing with vibecoded ones, and it'll be an acid test as to whether the pro and anti claims about AI-coding bear out in terms of code reliably.
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