Non-tech-related stories frequently make the front page here too. It just so happens that this site has a lot of coders because, err, it's literally Hacker News.
I mean, even in countries with extremely high levels of Christianity, such as Romania, you won't be accused of blasphemy for just... agreeing with science. Both Christianity and Islam are pretty similar after all, so hopefully that is not too surprising.
I can't think of a country where you even might be accused of blasphemy, though I'll admit I am not very familiar with the topic.
I mean, AI is not good at writing x86-64 assembly code. Last time I tried (with both Claude and ChatGPT), the AI failed to even create basic programs other than Hello World.
A constant stream of young workers is required for a sustainable economy.
In order to pay for pensions, the government borrows money from young, working adults. This is effectively what happens in pay-as-you-go public pension systems (which is most of them, to my knowledge, apart from the US, I'm not 100% sure how pensions work in the US). The money you put in actually goes to pay for another person, with the government guaranteeing that they will do the same for you.
If the percentage of retired people increases, the percentage of working adults naturally decreases. Eventually, you'll hit a turning point where the government can no longer borrow from working adults. The government is now in a debt crisis and has to loan money from banks or foreign investors at a significantly higher interest rate, which becomes even more unsustainable if the percentage of retired people increases even more.
This is what is happening in e.g. South Korea and Japan. There are too many old people, and too few working adults. This is caused ny low birth rates over a long period of time.
It's going to be painful, but at some point the bandaid has to be ripped off. This idea of sustaining our economic system infinitely through simply breeding more bodies is going to naturally fall apart in a world with non-infinite resources.
Or like the US solves it, through immigration. In the US, the fertility rate is at roughly 1.6 children per woman (which is below the 2.1 children per woman required for a stable population), and yet the US population is steadily increasing thanks to immigration. One can talk all day about pros and cons of immigration, but it is ultimately the only solution we have to a falling fertility rate (other than trying to increase it, of course).
Fertility in the migrant source areas is decreasing fast as well. At some point the books won't balance anymore, to provide a reliable flow of workers.
Yea, my comment was looking at it from a global point of view. We simply can't base the global economy on an infinitely growing population--it's ultimately a ponzi scheme.
Many countries don't have a Social Security equivalent, and people rely on their families instead. So not having kids can mean not having anyone to take care of you in old age, but it's maybe still ok if your siblings had kids. It's not that the economy overall relies on that.
It definitely depends on the platform, though. On GitHub, absolutely, work with the garage door up. But on some platforms, it's the complete opposite.
Many moons ago, I was making mod for a game and had the idea to publish it on Nexus Mods [0] so that I didn't have to bother setting anything up once I actually wanted to publish the initial release of the mod. It was not at all in a working state when I made the public page for it.
Imagine my surprise when I wake up the next day and have thousands of views on the page and a dozen comments berating me for publishing a mod that doesn't work...
Ever since then, I have had problems with working with the garage door up, even though I know that it's totally acceptable on GitHub. It's habit by now to work on everything with the garage door down, just in case...
Also I think fundamentally people on nexus mode assume: the mod is there=it work
The majority of people on there are not familiar with software dev concepts, they just seek cool new content for their fav game.
I get most people don’t want to fight that perception, but it’s an opportunity to educate people on the process, and if enough people do this, it normalizes the idea of people working on things, instead of the idea that products are delivered from the heavenly forges of big tech.
It’s something I admire about the best Kickstarter projects, and the framing that the platform has provided (even if it’s marketing facade now). You post regular updates about what you’re doing, you resist the urge to look perfect, you demystify creation. I think that’s kind of important for society to trust how our modern world was made, too.
My kids are going to have an advantage in making things from scratch because they simply witness me doing it.
It would be cool to be able to see a demo page for each of the different tiers, e.g. to see how much branding there is before signing up, or how much customisatio there is, etc.
If you're fine with a paid option (although it's source-available and distributed for "free" on their website), then Grayjay [0] is my personal favourite. I can't remember the last time I saw an error. On NewPipe, I can't say the same.
The Fast demo model is already very impressive. It was way better than expected, but still required being a bit verbose since it didn't seem to understand rarer words ("sauna" didn't get me anything pleasant, "hot sauna" did).
The generated palette seem to be a great indicator of whether the model understood the prompt or not.
I Haven't checked out the Python SDK yet, but it seems very interesting!
I'm curious to know if there is any reason for why you picked Gemma 1B for the Expressive model. Did it generate more cohesive parameters than other 1B models? Or was it just the first one you picked?
BTW - we used Gemma 270m model - not the 1B model. It's sheerly the size - I wanted to see if I could get a really, really tiny LLM to generate coherent music. Tbh, it didn't quite work as well as I expected. It barely beats a randomly generated track.
In fact, the 'fast' model (literally embedding lookup over a pre-generated library of music ... generated using Best-of-N on Gemini Flash) beats nearly everything - including Gemini Flash, Claude Opus, Gemma models.
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