If that book was titled "hey mentally ill person, you should kill yourself", and if I was handing it out in front of a clinic, then yes, I'd probably bear some blame.
Normal, well-adjusted people have genuine difficulty understanding the boundaries of this tech specifically because it's designed to be sycophantic and human-like. They ask AI for life and career advice, use it for therapy, ask it to interpret dreams, develop romantic relationships with AI "girlfriends", etc. I had two friends who believed they are "exploring the frontiers of science" with ChatGPT while spiraling into the depths of quantum multidimensional gobbledygook.
I'll give you that some on this is on us because we just don't know how to deal with a "human-shaped" conversation partner that isn't human and has no trouble praising Hitler if you prompt it the right way. But if you're building a billion- or trillion-dollar empire on top of it, you don't get to wash your hands clean.
Public schools are public schools. They're more or less compulsory and are just meant to try and get you to a point where you can contribute meaningfully to the society.
Princeton is very much optional and is a school for future elites. They're supposed to produce CEOs, politicians, and Nobel prize winners. So the standards should be different.
Of course, expectations are a part of the problem. Many kids go to Princeton or Stanford or MIT because they had wealthy parents who really wanted their kids to go there. And many of these kids are mostly interested in computer games, weed, and the opposite sex. A combination of unmotivated students and high academic standards lead to predictable outcomes.
Public universities (what Americans call public schools in the context of higher education) are optional to the exact same degree as private ones. In other words they are all schools that you apply to.
They also produce more "elites" than "elite" schools do if you go by executives at F500 companies and politicians.
Are we going to pretend that Berkley, Michigan, UNC-CH, UVA etc. do not produce world class educations from world class people?
But that's precisely the evolution we've seen in the past 20+ years. For the sake argument, let's say that Fox News started it by more overtly embracing a specific political alignment for stories and opinion programming. Then, MSNBC noticed and went the other way round. Then, "new age" outlets such as Breitbart News and HuffPo took that to its logical conclusion, not even pretending to describe reality and just focusing on portraying the other side as evil and dumb.
The end result isn't that we're more informed and enlightened as content consumers. It's that everyone has their own version of reality. The boring neoliberal consensus of the old had many downsides, but at least it provided some social cohesion in that everyone was more or less reading the same news.
I think Fox News is a good example, because their public messaging has always been "fair and balanced" while at the same time blatantly have a bias; this is just one aspect of how they are clearly deceptive. If instead of calling themselves "fair and balanced" they said they were all about "the Republican Perspective on News" they would immediately be more honest, and it would be easier to understand them as an organization, especially for the people who are regularly deceived by them right now.
I'm not arguing that we should try to exaggerate our biases, or even to center them, but rather, we can become more honest by making our biases clear and explicit to those we're communicating with. Many organizations avoid openly addressing their biases, which makes them less honest overall, and more prone to being deceptive. If you're aware of your biases you can actually account for them, as opposed to letting them blind you. Further, if you're public with that awareness, others can account for them as well, and be less likely to be deceived (even accidentally) by your communication.
Too often, bias is ignored. It always exists. If we name it and make it visible, then we can have a chance at reducing its potential for deception.
To be fair, my assumption on that line was always that they were saying they're balancing out the overall news world. Still dirty, of course. Regardless, everyone knows how they lean.
What grinds my gears is NPR. Every member drive they explicitly talk about how their coverage is fair and unbiased, which is way more egregious than some tagline. As far as having a bias and not owning up to it, I think they're the worst offenders right now.
Respectable journalism calls this an "editorial stance".
The Wall Street Journal has always been openly conservative in their bias that is most on display in editorials while they maintain a high quality, generally center-right news reporting division.
Similarly the Economist describe their stance as "radically centrism", which sounds a little strange but they outline it pretty well and are open about it.
I continue to be impressed by our collective willingness to engage with obvious AI slop, as long as it also talks about AI. Sincere question for any of the nearly 300 folks seem to be arguing about the article: why? The author couldn't be bothered to present their case, so they probably don't care about our opinion. They just want traffic and search ranking with the least amount of effort. The community is literally being played for clicks.
Is it just that the subject line alone is a springboard for casual discussion? If so, maybe that's fine, but then, it feels like we'd be better off cultivating these discussions as "ask HN" posts instead of boosting this kind of web content.
> Is it just that the subject line alone is a springboard for casual discussion?
I think this has been the case on many sites, for decades. Many people just want to read and write comments without engaging with the OP.
Have a look at this Reddit thread [0] about this Ars Technica article [1] - both are 15 years old.
I suppose in the 2010s this was an amusing detail of online discussion. In the 2020s it makes me feel a little uneasy - it suggests that the entire concept of people jumping from site to site, clicking links and understanding what they are writing about was flawed from the start. No wonder the internet became centralized and slopified.
And no, I didn’t read the OP, I found your comment to be more interesting to discuss. These days with AI articles flooding the internet it seems foolish to actually read articles before the comments.
Edit: although we have to contend with AI generated comments as well. I wonder how many of the comments on this page actually have original insights into the politico economics of AI.
The usual explanation in these threads are "chargebacks", but come on. Payment processors could deal with chargebacks and disputes just fine. They suck for the seller, not the credit card company.
What US companies are afraid of more is PR and regulatory risk. Zelle has no chargeback process, but still bans the sale of automatic knives, fireworks, ammo, and firearm parts. Venmo bans a nebulous category of "products that present a risk to consumer safety". You better not be buying any vintage lawn darts for your collection.
The chargeback rate on knives or firearm optics is probably not any higher than on anything else. What's higher is the likelihood of a headline along the lines of "kid dead / injured because of Paypal". And so, we end up with digital payment processors as the arbiters of morality.
My reaction to the first demo (recipe) is that it was slower than typing the same thing on your keyboard.
The second demo seems to be a wash: there's no time saved in saying "move this" versus "move crab". And an app-specific contextual menu would probably be faster.
The third demo doesn't seem to warrant the use of a pointer at all, since there is only one way to interpret the prompt.
None of this means that this approach will not be successful, but there's a reason why so many attempts to revolutionize user interfaces ended up going nowhere. Talking to your computer was always supposed to be the future, but in practice, it's slower and more finicky than typing.
In fact, the only new UI paradigm of the past 28+ years appears to have been touchscreens and swipe gestures on phones. But they are a matter of necessity. No one wants to finger-paint on a desktop screen.
Talking to your computer can only ever work for people in atomized work-from-home silos, surely. I can't really imagine living in a world where everybody is just muttering commands to the computer all the time.
Aren’t radiologists dictating notes rather than issuing commands to the computer? From supporting them for a few years, I recall them having pretty good facility using the computer to zoom/filter/isolate parts of images, and most of the muttering was speech to text or a good old tape recorder for their writeups.
The dictation happens while reviewing images and the dictation software includes support for voice macros ranging from edits to adding information from the chart and other applications. Not quite the same as just recording.
> My reaction to the first demo (recipe) is that it was slower than typing the same thing on your keyboard.
For you and me, who have used keyboard in our lives for more than 1,000 or even 10,000 hours.
There was a brief period when typing slowed people down because they could write the same information down with pen&paper, and that period eventually passed.
But, you have been using your mouse and keyboard for many years, so you know well how to use them quickly. I think that you shouldn't expect to be able to be quick with a new input type when you only tried it for a few minutes
The main thrust behind their foray into hardware was that they feared being cut off. Whoever controls the terminal has the power to push users toward their own platforms (Bing, Microsoft 365, etc), and I guess they could see the writing on the wall and wanted to have a platform they control.
As for this project, I think part of it is just the conclusion of internal power plays between Chrome and Android. The other half is probably the same fear as before: if Microsoft puts their own AI closer to the user, Google will have a hard time keeping up. So the best defense is to have your own "AI-first" OS.
Keep in mind that Microsoft doesn't need to win to hurt Google's bottom line. For example, if Bing captures 5% of search through OS- and browser-bundling strategies, that's still a 5% that Google can't have.
I think this is an odd article. It mixes together a variety of technologies that have little in common (gas discharge tubes, CRTs). It doesn't really say anything about the operation of vacuum tubes, their advantages, or disadvantages. And doesn't even really support its own thesis. The reign of vacuum tubes lasted for less than the reign of the transistor and is in no way unusual in the world of electronics.
There are quite a few interesting stories to tell here. Probably the most interesting one is that transistors still underperform vacuum tubes in many respects that would matter to purists, but that don't matter in real life because we learned to compensate for it. Well, except for niche audiophile audiences who don't believe in negative feedback or digital signal processing and want a very linear amplifying component... that they then connect to op-amps, DACs, and ADCs on both sides because that's the only practical way to do it, but there's a performative tube somewhere in between.
Another cool story: there were some "integrated circuit" vacuum tubes!
There's really not benefits to vacuum tubes pretty much anywhere. The only place I can think of where they are superior (which may not be true anymore) is high power transmission in, for example, radio and radar towers.
In all other applications transistors will be superior. Especially because any problem from a transistor can be fixed by adding more transistors until the problem is gone or imperceptible.
The audiophile purists are using pseudo-intelectualism to justify a superiority complex. They frequently fail double blind tests whenever push comes to shove. The most famous example of this was them being incapable of telling the difference between a coat-hanger and a premium cable.
> There's really not benefits to vacuum tubes pretty much anywhere. The only place I can think of where they are superior (which may not be true anymore) is high power transmission in, for example, radio and radar towers.
Tubes are still fairly common in 62 dBm HF ham amplifiers, but solid-state amplifiers are available now, so it's only a matter of time there.
> In all other applications transistors will be superior. Especially because any problem from a transistor can be fixed by adding more transistors until the problem is gone or imperceptible.
This is often, but not always, true. E.g. parallel MOSFETs operating in triode mode are subject to thermal-runaway.
> The audiophile purists are using pseudo-intelectualism to justify a superiority complex. They frequently fail double blind tests whenever push comes to shove. The most famous example of this was them being incapable of telling the difference between a coat-hanger and a premium cable.
Tube amps often will be audibly different in a double-blind because many of them have high harmonic distortion (as compared to a transistor amp). Most people think this is a Bad Thing, but audiophiles call it a "warm sound."
What you say is true if we operate gear within specs. In guitar amplifiers when tubes are overdriven tubes, they still matter. Only in the past decade (circa) digital guitar amp simulations started to become sufficiently advanced to deliver convincing organic sounding results on that front, with DSP-based hardware that is suitable for the stage.
But if all you want is the sound of an overdriven tube amplifier, getting yourself an overdriven tube amplifier is still the least complex option technically, in terms of parts count, repairability, etc. It is a primitive technology, but it is also well known and works. It also has no menus, minimal settings and doesn't need firmware updates or registered accounts.
Personally I use both Class D and transistor based audio amplifiers for my musician life, since those are much lighter to carry for the same power and work for the type of sound I want.
If we talk Hifi unless they also want to overdrive the sound (they usually don't), tube amps are useless. The distortion figures of good transistor amps are much better, class D is making massive leaps in the recent years and has reached indistinguishable quality levels for a while now. These people should focus on room acoustics.
And Hamamatsu (and some others) still produce and sell photomultiplier tubes.
The microchannel plate PMTs are pretty nifty things [1]. You can get single-digit picosecond time resolution out of them.
[1]: https://www.hamamatsu.com/us/en/product/optical-sensors/pmt/...
Eh. As far as instrument amps go, it's not about perfect fidelity. It's about color and distortion. You'd never say "perfectly white lights are the best for your living room." No one actually wants a perfect white light, people want some more yellow in there because it looks better. The goal isn't equal spectrum coverage or whatever. People like the non-linearity of tubes and that's ok.
The thing is, much like "perfectly white lights" you can mimic the non-linear behavior of tubes with transistor circuitry. On the extreme end you can integrate a DSP into the line to add a "vacuum tube" filter onto the sound in pre-amp.
Thinking you can't do that is like thinking all LED bulbs must be 5000k and only incandescent can give that warm glow (Which, funnily that color was chosen to mimic gas lights before incandescents).
LED is vastly inferior to incandescent. Only very high end LED starts to get closer, practically only used in luxury building in Middle East (Dubai) and China
But when you do that, you are still holding the tube circuit as the reference model. And what you built is more complicated; it has components that have no counterpart in the tube circuit. (In the digital case, you have hundreds of millions of tiny transistors, which are switching full on or off.)
No one said you can't do it. There's just no reason to do it. Tube amps are basically a standard and it's what the amp repair guys know how to work on and it's easiest to work on.
There are real reasons to do that, even if you like tube amps:
- Tube amps need regular tube swaps. For a small guitar Combo a set of tubes (3× preamp + 2× power amp) can cost between 100 to 150 Euros. If you're a poor musician that is a factor
- Tube amps use heavy power and output transformers. If you ever had to carry an Ampeg SVT (36 kg for 300W) you will cherish the idea of a 0.25 kg 500W class D amp. If you're a touring musician that is a factor
- Tube amps are limited in terms of sound. While this could be seen both as a feature and a bug, if you want to recall the perfect settings for each song as a touring musician, tube amps are not the right choice unless you have a horde of roadies and technicians
This is why amp sims have become more popular in the recent years with people who play music for a living.
That being said, if you're in a simple band and you want the sound of a tube amp, a tube amp gives it to you pretty reliably without making you drown in options or giving you the feeling your gear is outdated every other year, since it is outdated since decades anyways. A tube amp also needs no firmware updates and requires no subscription and has less parts that can break.
I disagree. There is nothing in the digitally sampled and modelled world comparable to plugging your guitar into a hot over-driven tube amp and showing the feedback who's the boss. Pure analog transistors don't give that luscious even harmonic distortion and usually just clip like a meth-addled dog stylist in a poodle-grooming station.
As a guitarist with over 30 years of playing, and owner of many tube and non-tube amps, I disagree. Even experienced guitarist cannot reliably distinguish between transistor and tube circuits in a blind test. Having said that, if only the knowledge of playing a tube amp gives someone a better experience, even if its not empirically distinguishable, thats a perfectly valid reason to prefer it.
An experienced guitarist cannot distinguish between "captured" amps, or amps which at their core simulate vacuum tubes at the software level. I definitely can't tell the two apart. However, I believe it is easy to distinguish a pure vacuum tube-based circuit from a JFET/MOSFET-based one.
There do exist vacuum tube replacements like the AMT 12AX7WS [1] or Jet City's RetroVales [2], but I would argue that the fact that they try to emulate tubes via transistors is a strong indicator that the natural circuits for both sound distinct enough for guitarists.
Not who you are responding to, but I'd say the point I was making wasn't that the sound wasn't different (though, the differences are almost certainly not large enough that most people can tell the difference). But rather that if that exact sound profile is desirable, it's easy to reproduce with transistors alone.
I see your point, though strictly speaking, the two products I mentioned mimic 12AX7 tubes, which are preamp tubes. I'm not aware of E2E designs that also mimic power tubes.
Maybe recently, with impulse responses and Fractal Axes-like machines, you can get any sound from silicon. But in the 90's the difference between silicon guitarrists (Dimebag Darrell or Chuck Schuldiner) and tubes was clearly noticeable.
Also, some 90's lower end amps with a valve in the prev sounded way better than similar priced amps that opted for pure solid state, at least for metal music and high distortion. For the clean channel the difference between them was minor.
But the transistor circuit designers have gone out of their way to put in "tube like" behaviors which result in extra circuits and components that don't appear in the tube amp, and which would not appear in a "high fidelity" transistor amplifier.
One very common trick that has appeared in transistor guitar amps from the 1970's and onward is current feedback. The return terminal of the speaker doesn't go straight to ground, but feeds a tiny current-sensing resistor, like 0.1 ohms. Signal from the current-sensing resistor is combined into the negative feedback. This gives the amp a nonzero output impedance against the speaker, which changes the frequency response: more power is driven at the frequencies where the speaker impedes more, like its resonant frequency (about 70 to 100 Hz for a 12" guitar speaker) and high frequencies (due to voice coil inductance: rises from about 2 kHz up or something like that).
This doesn't reproduce everything that happens with tubes, but it goes a long way.
I built a circuit like that into an off-the-shelf amplifier, with a switch. I tell you, whenever I switch that off, it's not long before it goes back on again. Without the current feedback, it's sounds blatty/tubby and lifeless. It's not just the frequency response, because even if we dial in a similar EQ curve before the amp to eliminate the difference, it's not "it".
The TubeWorks people have an interesting design in the MosValve 500 amp. Rather than using current feedback, that amp places the MOSFET output stage outside of the negative feedback loop. Negative feedback is drawn from the VAS (voltage amplification stage) before the output stage. That means that the speakers will see the impedance of the MOSFETs. Plus the supposedly "tube like" overdrive characteristics of the power devices will come into play when that thing is cranked. Because they are outside of the NFB loop, it will just be soft onset clipping. Here is the important thing: unusually, the VAS and the output stage are on separate power rails, and those of the VAS are a significantly higher voltage (+/- 93V versus +/- 71V). So it is hard to make the VAS clip; it requires a much higher signal than what it takes to make the output stage go into progressive clipping. When an output stage is included the feedback loop, like in almost every amplifier out there, the amp is perfectly linear up to the limit, and then clips really hard.
I bought new vacuum tubes just last week. For guitar amplifiers vacuum tubes are still pretty common. If you want a simple, horribly inefficient circuit that sounds good with an electric guitar vacuum tubes are great, mostly because they overdrive a bit more gracefully than transistors.
For my daily band life my amp of choice is a Roland JC-120 for guitar (transistor amp) and a Eich T-500 (class D) for Bass.
Can't wait for class D to catch up to tubes, I really don't dig having to carry 30kg amps around.
a non-trivial portion of the guitar-amp world is still very much set on tubes, even as amp simulators get closer to "the real thing".
a cool recent development i've been following is the Octal by Verellen Devices (created by an awesome musician who also built some highly coveted boutique all-tube amps): https://www.verellendevices.com - it's basically designed to replicate the push/pull of power tubes in a solid-state package to push extremely loud guitar cab speakers. they seem to impart their own sound signature but still sound really really good, especially compared to a lot of solid-state guitar amps.
> I wonder what gives them that "high confidence", as opposed to this being just a traditional zero-day?
Google, Cloudflare, and Microsoft are a trio of companies that get to see most of what's going on the internet. I imagine that if they see you attacking them, they can work back from that and get remarkably far, even against sophisticated actors. If it's their LLM, they presumably keep transcripts. If you searched for the affected API function via a search engine, they almost certainly know. Even if you used a competing search product, you probably went to a site that has Google Analytics. Oh, and one of these companies probably has your DNS lookups. And a good chunk of the world's email traffic. And telemetry from your workstation. And auto-uploaded crash reports... And if it's bad, they can work together behind the scenes to get to the bottom of it.
So, when their threat intel orgs say they have high confidence in something, I'd be inclined to believe it.
None of what you've said is untrue. And if this was an internal report to an executive, I'd agree with it. But this is a public statement and I'm more inclined to believe that this is part of a coordinated run up to a move to ban the import of 'dangerous' Chinese AI models -- or something else equally self serving -- than a simple statement of truth.
I don't doubt that they found some evidence of AI use. I'm just skeptical that the amount and strength of evidence has anything to do with their making this statement.
I've been thinking about why the AI companies are making so much use of fear based marketing. And I'm wonder if it isn't just naked Machiavellianism at work.
For a long time tech companies were forced to compete for power by being the most loved (or at least not the most hated). But now they've found an avenue to cultivate fear.
i’m inclined to agree. it sounds like yet another attempt at regulatory capture. keep anyone else from developing or using models including open weight models
Anthropic has fallen behind with Opus 4.7 a downgrade from 4.6, and codex 5.5 being noticably better. Everyone I know (which is an obviously small, biased sample) has switched over to codex. So Anthropic can fear monger about Mythos all they want, they're losing revenue because they haven't released it and their competitor is getting that revenue. But that's looking at individual players in the market.
Normal, well-adjusted people have genuine difficulty understanding the boundaries of this tech specifically because it's designed to be sycophantic and human-like. They ask AI for life and career advice, use it for therapy, ask it to interpret dreams, develop romantic relationships with AI "girlfriends", etc. I had two friends who believed they are "exploring the frontiers of science" with ChatGPT while spiraling into the depths of quantum multidimensional gobbledygook.
I'll give you that some on this is on us because we just don't know how to deal with a "human-shaped" conversation partner that isn't human and has no trouble praising Hitler if you prompt it the right way. But if you're building a billion- or trillion-dollar empire on top of it, you don't get to wash your hands clean.