You didn't say anything that conflicts with what the parent said. You are the one who is detached from reality. People use computers and hate computers at the same time. People use programming languages and hate programming languages at the same time. People participate in capitalism and hate capitalism at the same time. It is not hypocritical to hate complex systems and also use them for pragmatic reasons. The difference is just that the delta is larger this time - people use AI and really hate AI. This makes perfect sense when you consider what AI is and does, especially how many different things it does.
One of the problems is that the term itself got muddled to the point of becoming almost meaningless. It covers anything from pattern recognition, classification, to diffusion models. But the fact remains that many people have a love/hate relationship with LLMs.
> Statements like this are just totally detached from reality.
Funny, I could say the same about this condescending statement. Maybe it depends on who you interact with. I associate with almost no tech people outside of work, and am probably a bit on the younger side compared to most people on HN.
"The technology" isn't all that useful apart from search engine summaries and voice recognition. "Incredibly popular" is an empty statement. Of course everyone uses that stuff. So what?
This is all purely iterative on what we already had long before the buzz about "AI". At some point you just have to admit this was all a grift scraped together to drum up some business during an economic downturn. I don't think many are that mad about it, but the hype needs to stop already.
People were underwhelmed. We're heading into another AI winter. The datacenters were always for defense and surveillance. Deals will fall through and only half will finish being built.
The majority of experts were saying this years ago. Let it go man.
the wild thing about this is that _we have contemporaneous records of how they were built_. They know the names of architects and managers. There's no mystery to it at all.
There are actually "marked" decks you can buy that come with an iphone app that tell you exactly where every card on the deck is by looking at the side.
Marked decks are an ancient tradition for both cheaters and magicians. There are also ways to mark a deck that aren't obvious to most people with a casual inspection and that don't need an app to read from the edge.
You might be surprised at how close they sometimes get, at a glance. For close up magic it has to be readable at a quick glance (without an app). For some of the cheating it has to "not even be a glance" because you can't get caught looking at the side of a deck.
To be fair, sure most of those marking strategies are approximations designed for a specific trick or a specific gambling game and so don't always need to be 100% of the state information (suit and rank of every individual card). But there are certainly close up magic reasons to have a deck you can find exact cards by marks. Though also to be fair, many (but not all) of those do move the marks to the back of the card with the assumption that you can at least spread the backs of the cards.
Yeah, a "perfect" shuffle is known as a faro shuffle and it's the basis of a lot of magic tricks, but it's a weird looking shuffle and it sort of ruins the tricks once you can recognize it.
Yeah, I worked on getting a Faro for a while when I was a teenager but gave up on it after a few months. I even got some coaching and tips from the Professor and Earl Nelson, so the issue was definitely not a lack of knowing the best ways it's ever been done :-). I just couldn't get it quite reliable enough to 100% trust in performance. Plus most of the Faro effects that were hot at the time were poker stacks and I was never really into those plots.
Now, all these decades later, I don't regret giving up on the Faro and a burnable 2nd. I got along just fine without either one as there's so many ways to reach the same destinations. It's weird how some moves just 'speak to you' right away and others never seem to sit right. Best advice I ever got was to not force it. If progress stalls out, just move on.
Yeah, I also cannot get a perfect faro consistently enough. I can consistently get 51 cards correct every time. It’s actually amazing how I am off by one every single one.
That’s a thing where when you know how hard the trick is, it makes it better.
Very cool your training.
And same on poker plots. I can do them infinite other cooler ways, so what’s the point?
The burnable 2nd I have. But it’s not the traditional 2nd. I have practiced and still practice the Richard Turner style 2nd, but I never do it in a performance. I use another path to get to the same result.
Wasn’t planning on Magic Live, but I should see where it is and when.
> I can consistently get 51 cards correct every time.
That's not a bug, it's a feature! Just do a "new deck order restore" with the selected card out of seq. :-)
> when you know how hard the trick is, it makes it better.
Totally! A few years ago I shared my view on "The Progression of Close-up Magic" (pardon the paste):
1. When you're 12, you're happy if a trick fools anyone.
2. Once you get older and have practiced a lot, you start to feel cocky that almost all your tricks fool almost everyone.
3. Then you keep practicing obsessively, start sessioning with good magicians and get humbled all over again. But in their work you start to realize there are levels of depth beyond just fooling people. You can finally see the path and your journey begins.
4. If you keep no-lifing it, eventually those magicians you respect, start respecting a few of your moves back. And that feels better than the loudest applause from any audience.
5. If you're a public performer, you're now probably working regularly. You fool all non-magicians all the time, and even other magicians some of the time. All your years of practice and study have finally paid off. Then you realize, most nights the valets make more than you do. :-)
6. But you keep doing it because you love it, except now the only audience you're working to impress is yourself. Non-magicians love it just as much whether you do easy tricks the easy way or hard tricks the hard way. In competent hands, they all look identical.
But you keep looking for even harder stuff, and then spend hours reworking the methods, exploring how to create the same effect in new ways. You sweat the meta stuff - structure, timing, flow. You pick up new subtleties by studying ancient VHS videos of the old masters. How Slydini's body language made his lapping transcendent. You contemplate how Goshman put that goddamn coin under a clear water glass, in the middle of an empty table, under a spotlight, with 80 year-old arthritic hands. And no one saw him do it. No trick, no move, just pure Jedi misdirection. And no audience will ever know the hours you waste obsessing on this. To everyone else, the tricks look exactly the same, but you do it your own weird, much harder way simply because you think it's neat, elegant, clever or sometimes just because it feels a little more right.
7. At that point, whether you keep working as a pro or even still perform magic at all becomes irrelevant. It's just a day job like any other. You do magic for yourself and maybe handful of others who 'get it'. The tech equivalent is kind of like the time I realized I'd spent more time (and had more fun) reading Doom's source code than I ever had playing the game.
> I can do them infinite other cooler ways, so what’s the point?
One cold deck is worth a thousand perfect Faros :-).
> Very cool your training.
I'd been obsessed with magic since I was 7 and was lucky enough to live in Los Angeles. When I was 16 I heard about the Magic Castle Junior program, then just in it's third year. When I auditioned, Vernon himself (then in his late 80s) was one of the three judges. No pressure, kid - it's just the guy that book you've had since you were 12 titled World's Greatest Magic says is "the greatest magician of the 20th century." The Castle Juniors was the hardest audition in magic because they lose money on (and have to mentor) every kid they let in. Three tricks, 10 minutes. I was so nervous, I blew two of my three tricks. Complete fail. I was so naive and stupid, all three tricks I picked were originals with insanely high difficulty. I had zero chance of nailing them under the pressure and lights of the Castle close-up gallery. :-)
I was shocked when I found out I'd gotten in on my first audition (the avg was 3). Vernon was at my first meeting, took me aside and made it very clear he'd voted against me because I "sucked." He blamed the other two other judges for being 'softies' who gave partial credit to my failed tricks because they were "mildly interesting" twists. Vernon stayed tough on me for all my years in the Juniors, but I did learn a lot from the cranky old bastard. Once when I was classic palming a coin, he slapped my hand and snorted "you palm like a girl!" Offended, I replied "At least the coin didn't fall out when you hit my hand." He rolled his eyes, and sighed "Kid, if you're doing it right, it should fall out!" Vernon passed away a few years after I turned 21 and became a regular member. It wasn't until I was invited to be a judge for regular member auditions that I learned Magic Castle auditions require that all three judges vote "Yes" to accept anyone. Vernon had lied to me! That was the moment I began to suspect maybe he didn't believe I was completely hopeless! I think he just saw how arrogant and cocky I was and knew I needed to be humbled before I could learn anything he had to teach. At best, Vernon seemed to find all the Juniors annoying, and at worst, insufferable. We used to wonder why he bothered showing up to every meeting since we were so hopeless. Only in later years did I appreciate the gift he was giving us and the legacy he was creating. That first decade of graduates from the Juniors created a shocking number of the top magical performers, creators and teachers in the world (although I don't count myself in that lofty company).
I 'dropped out' as a performer after 4 years working full-time as a pro to become a serial tech startup entrepreneur. A few years ago, Stan asked me to give the opening keynote at Magic Live to reflect on how, in my case, so much early magic potential and world-class mentoring "had gone so horribly wrong." :-) My conclusion was that learning the centuries-old craft, rigor and discipline of inventing all-new ways to make the impossible seem possible, and then the showmanship to present it well - was the best training possible for a successful career in tech.
> The burnable 2nd I have.
I'm envious. Mine's just ugly. I kept playing with it on and off over the years but when I saw Lennart Green do his (face up!) I officially gave up on it forever. :-) Of course, Vernon was one of the few humans ever to master a perfect burnable middle. But that's a god move beyond us mere mortals. (Excellent book on Vernon's years long journey to get that 'perfect middle': https://www.amazon.com/dp/0805074066).
> Wasn’t planning on Magic Live, but I should see where it is and when.
First week of August in Vegas (usually the same week as Blackhat). I go every year just to hang out with friends from the old days. Ping me if you go.
I demo'd an automated agent platform here and showed it doing PRs, and the CEO asked me what i'd do for a living after this did all my work for me, and I said, "What do you think that you do that an agent can't do?".
While you're not wrong the problem is they own the company or the board listens to them. They have power they can use to keep existing while you don't. This is why AI is so scary to working professionals.
> the tone makes it seem like founding a startup is something you wake up one morning and just decide to do instead of, say, going to the park.
I'm not sure it's a crazy idea when you can run a whole revenue generating company with basically zero employees. You could have a successful 'startup' generating 200k in revenue a year, you just need to cover the cost of your anthropic subscription.
Photographs made technical skill at recreating reality with paint less relevant, while making point of view, staging, etc, more important. You can absolutely create a photograph that is art, but a camera is not an artist, the person holding it is.
I think what people find beautiful in math is largely something that enables the mathematics (or physics) to be translated to something that they can think about intuitively, and what people can handle in an intuitive way is largely an artifact of what the brain evolved to be able to think about "naturally". But it's quite possible that most things that are true about the universe or math are just ugly and unintuitive, and the pursuit of truth shouldn't necessarily be limited by what people can easily reason about and hold in their heads.
Beautiful explanations are lovely when they exist, but we shouldn't wait for them if we can also find the truth through an ugly method.
> We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry.
I used to work at an overnight NOC many years ago, and I literally learned bash and python just to save time so I could spend more time watching netflix or whatever instead of working. Instead, my scripts handled so many alerts that they laid off someone and gave me a promotion to being a sys admin :(
I've been chasing the dream of automating my job away and collecting a paycheck for doing nothing for decades now, and I keep getting promoted...
Maybe that acronym is tainted, but the technology isn’t going anywhere.
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