> Concerns with his politics aside, I do think there's a truth to what he's talking about here
One thing the AI era has changed for me is how easily I spot Gell-Mann amnesia, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
His politics, even putting aside their nature, are framed with deliberate misuse of facts and data; why would he be someone to listen to in any depth on any other topic?
Gell-Mann amnesia assumes a journalist is not an expert on _anything_. In this case, DHH is (according to some) an expert on software but it's much less clear he's an expert on politics. So I'm not sure Gell-Mann amnesia applies here, it's maybe more like Nobel disease, where you're an expert on one thing and assume it "transfers" to other fields.
I have a background in sociology and urban planning. It's very clear that DHH is not an expert on politics. His blog posts demonstrate a very elementary understanding of the topics he covers. He doesn't even understand statistics.
With his infamous "As I remember London" article [1] he directly correlated skin colour to nationality leading to the claim that native Brits had dropped from 60% to a third.
If you check now using current sources the British-born population is still around 59% the only thing that has changed is that fewer people identify themselves on the census as 'White British' which has a host of reasons around it. So he took a misleading statistic, interpreted it incorrectly and then built some kind of nostalgic story around it to support what was essentially an excuse to support far-right thugs protesting.
Thank you for mentioning the effect by name. I read first about it 20 years ago, memorized it under a totally different name, and was never able to find it again.
> The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias where a person spots major errors in a media report on a topic they know well, yet completely forgets that unreliability and trusts the rest of the same publication on unfamiliar topics.
Yes. I am broadening the definition of "media" and "publication", maybe, though it is posts on his own publishing platform and performances at his own breakaway conference.
But if someone misrepresents deliberately on a topic of polarising importance, why would you spend any time listening to them on any other topic?
I would (still) listen to him if I did not know he wrote stupid wrong things on other topics in bad faith.
Do you automatically dismiss everything someone says based on their opinions on other topics not relevant to their main job? Is everything always absolutes?
DHH or anyone else spouting opinions on social media is hardly qualified to be setting policies for countries. Social media is also hardly the place to have any sort of debate on those topics.
Apparently somewhere between a third to a half of American scientists believe in some kind of god. Not to denegrate those who believe, but that's some kind of compartmentalization going on. Politics isn't any different. I dunno, I guess I don't have much issue listening to people with whom I disagree. Some people just get stuck on things. I do to, and maybe I'm the one that's wrong.
Some teachers do genuinely make a difference, and maybe that's good enough, but unfortunately there are many more who struggled to add value to the original material, and I don't really think this is a unique experience.
Of all the teachers I have ever had, at school and university, I can think of only three who struggled to add value to the original material. One was in the middle of a nervous breakdown (of a kind that genuinely would not have been out of place in the John Hughes movies of the day, but that contributed to him passing the following summer); the other two were in the middle of significant crises of different forms.
So that's about 0.75%.
The rest were either competent, good or amazing.
(Then again, one of the remainder was internationally famous for being a (self-acknowledged) media whore and while I know he added value it wasn't always to the subject at hand)
Not sure the US Department of Education did much that would influence this either way, except if the AI was being used to correct income-disparity effects on education.
It doesn't mandate curriculums, choose technology, anything like that? Only recommendations.
They might have been able to monitor its effects but they wouldn't have been able to direct its use or non-use; that's not what they did.
Essentially it was/is an anti-discrimination organisation, making sure that states gave an education regardless of wealth/race/status.
> If you have a regular tutor and replace it with an AI, how many times do you think you'd accidentally meet your AI in town getting coffee and have a nice chat?
You will never get the chance to sit and talk with your now-elderly tutor, in the future, and tell them how much they helped you, or pay their deeper contribution forward by tutoring someone else.
Your AI tutor also doesn't know a job you should apply for, or a local group you could join for your other hobby they now know a lot about, or… or…
I mean the list of intangibles goes on and on, doesn't it? But here at HN people like to disrupt.
It's more like the cost of living crisis in Australia means that despite a likely oversupply of tutors working second jobs, people can't actually afford to pay tutors.
AI tutors will absolutely be worse, not better, but they may also be only a fraction of the price.
AI firms buying and destroying the sources of knowledge is a weird way to get us to Fahrenheit 451 but maybe the USA will get there before it switches to metric after all.
> Why would Anthropic pay through the nose and make such desperate moves for compute?
That's pretty consistent with them having not been able to get the physical data centre capacity they have supposedly had built actually online, I think?
More to the point, Anthropic appears to mostly be capable of serving its customers, doesn't it? It's not so resource-starved that people aren't able to use it at all.
So what does it tell you that only 300 megawatts was enough to make a very meaningful difference to that?
If Anthropic's fortunes can be meaningfully changed by only 300MW which allowed them to uncap their customers, what is the case — even including OpenAI and Google -- for the demand for the 23GW of unbuilt AI data centre build commitments out there?
Satya Nadella himself said there will be some oversupply.
What if there is actually lots of oversupply?
My instinct is that the internet/software/IT industry sees its own demand for Anthropic and OpenAI and is misleading itself into thinking that this is representative of customer demand in the rest of the industry, let alone others, when what possible other human industry tasks are there that match the compute demands of writing software?
Another way to look at it: if the general demand for AI compute is so insatiable, how in this world of existing insatiable demand did xAI have spare capacity to lease? Why does Meta have spare capacity to lease?
The issue here is very evidently one of allocation. But allocation tends to get solved over time. That could leave quite a lot of very big data centres relatively empty.
If you get a little into grounded scifi the buildout seems more realistic. Robotics are making great strides while this buildout is happening. Imagine the implications of a human shaped robot? Now it isn't just knowledge work but literally every job on earth that is on the table. Now you can't get enough of that compute as you chew through obsoleting 8 billion humans from their current levels of participation in the economy.
I mean I do think there’s some likely extra demand, though I think it’s likely some demand will fall away from data centres to the desktop.
(And what you imply is also true, isn’t it - OpenRouter and equivalents will address this demand while also resolving some underlying underutilisation)
But the claims of awful shortages feel wrong when there’s little evidence of radical undersupply for the two big firms who are offering heavily subsidised plans.
It all seems pinned on the idea that some compute-guzzling application users clearly don’t have right now will emerge.
The E61 had S60v3 and it was weird but really very usable. A device that was in many ways ahead of its time. VoIP, Webkit, fully usable IMAP email.
But Nokia smartphones were essentially shut out of the US phone market by the toxic carrier-exclusives situation and their corrupt allergy to on-device Wifi (Nokia couldn't get a major carrier to take the E61 until they repackaged it as the E62 without wifi)
There was also s80 for the 9200/9500 and the s90 family of devices that didn’t get much beyond 2005.
Sad really as I worked several of the UI parts. We had a fully customisable Home Screen where you could add and remove pages, move app icons - long before iPhone or android. It all got bined due to management preferring keyboard devices over touch screens.
They made real smartphones (if you are in the USA you may not have seen them until it was too late).
They did have rather a lack of focus and Symbian was too diverse by that point, but there were some outstanding tail-end S60 devices (the E61 being one of them — it had 3G and a webkit browser before the iPhone).
IMO Nokia failed at least in part because of Stephen Elop's choices.
One thing the AI era has changed for me is how easily I spot Gell-Mann amnesia, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
His politics, even putting aside their nature, are framed with deliberate misuse of facts and data; why would he be someone to listen to in any depth on any other topic?
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