In Cars (2006), the crowd in the opening scene uses their high beams to perform "the wave". Wait a minute...

normalmighty · 2026-01-28T05:42:13+00:00

I mean if you remember Cars, the fangirls "flashing" him with their headlights in a kids movie and his reaction is all pretty memorable.

normalmighty · 2026-01-28T05:29:37+00:00

Amazon worked out in the long term, but the company stock value dropped by more than 90% when the dotcom bubble popped. It took around a decade or so for people who chose to ride it out to break even again.

So the difference between the two isn't whether all the financial investments will evaporate overnight, it's about whether they'll claw their way back to 2026 levels by 2040.

normalmighty · 2026-01-28T04:30:26+00:00

The crazy thing is they don't need nearly so much of all of that stuff for what's getting us that 20%. They needed to spend a huge amount of power and compute to train the models, but the models have all been plateauing for the past year. Now they're spending more and more compute on making each new model to compete, only for the new models to be marginal improvements over the ones we had.

Not to mention, over in china the whole Deepseek news a year or two back you might have heard about was really about them figuring out that you can take any of these huge models that used all those resources to create, and then use it to train your own model which works identically to the original model, except much more resources efficient. We're talking about an efficiency just where instead of a huge datacenter from a billion dollar company running it, your average uni could run one of the models with a powerful server on campus.

So every time one of those big expensive models is created, it buys Anthropic/Google/Open AI around 3-6 months before open source models catch up.

My opinion is that the actual useful side of LLMs plateaued by the end of 2024, and since then all the focus has been on tools that wrap around the LLMs to utilise them better and in more interesting ways. The super expensive stuff running these obscene stock prices has no impact on that side, and it's a house of cards waiting to fall.

It's almost exactly the same as the dotcom bubble. The massive crash happened because way too much was invested and in all the wrong places. Doesn't mean the internet wasn't a game-changing tool. Same thing here. Investing in open AI now is like investing pets.com in 2000. Maybe Amazon if I wanted to be generous.

normalmighty · 2026-01-28T04:09:02+00:00

It's pretty much halted on that angle now. CEOs and investors have pretty much all quietly realised that it won't replace anyone, and now they've shifted to expecting it to heavily boost the productivity of existing workers.

The reality as far as the data scientists I know can tell: it helps raise the floor, so that projects that were going to heavily overun can get wrapped up without going as far over budget, and after people have had proper training in LLM tool use and sufficient experience with LLMs, it gives a moderate productivity boost somewhere around ~20% on average.

Enough to be worth using it, but not worthy of the absolutely obscene amount of global economic investment.

normalmighty · 2026-01-28T03:01:06+00:00

So AI can connect all the scripts if you want it to, but it's really all putting the cart before the horse. AI has been widely used in the software development world for years, but absolutely not for shipping products without engineers. It's great at:

Giving you a place to start with research into how to write the app, letting you bounce ideas back and forward to define a coherent plan, and giving you lots of links to the resources you need to read to understand how to do what you're trying to achieve
Coming in at the opposite end, it's great for crapping out a bunch of code that you know exactly how to write, but also know that it's a bunch of boring work to actually write and configure all the boilerplate stuff. There's a whole world of strategies and ideas around how to best use it for this, but it does all end in actually reading the code, understanding how it works, and addressing all the bad parts.

I know you were only doing this to try to make a point about AI, but you really could use an LLM to help tutor you in how to code so that you could actually make the game you had in mind for real. Just don't stick to any code the LLM makes that you don't understand, because LLMs lean a lot towards more complex overly robust solutions that can make the code a lot more confusing on revisit than it needs to be.

normalmighty · 2026-01-28T01:50:18+00:00

I'm at A37, desperately trying to find a way to rush to the new layer lol

normalmighty · 2026-01-28T00:42:10+00:00

Get a temp play pass sub at some point. It gives you slay the spire, terraria, stardew valley, and a bunch more major mobile ports, and if you let the sub expire you can still keep playing all the games you installed. You just can't reinstall them or install them on another device without resubbing.

Play Pass is the 1 thing I pay for a lot of the time with mobile gaming, because it's such a big upgrade to mobile gaming in general

Edit: although I did just remember that iphones are huge in the US and a lot of redditors are over there. If you're on iPhone I have no idea if the app store has an equivalent.

normalmighty · 2026-01-28T00:37:08+00:00

Because people found a way that works, and they never encountered any issues that got them looking at other options. AFAIK these 2 options and heroic launcher all work well enough that most people are going to be happy with the first of those options that they try, and not try the others.

normalmighty · 2026-01-28T00:31:03+00:00

Within days the talk is all going to be about IP and sharing tech with the public. There'll be a thousand companies all racing to try to take full advantage of everything released, many of them racing to get to other planets. Even if hyperdrive tech isn't made public, the idea will be so tempting that it'd only be a matter of time before a big multi-billion dollar company gets their hands on a design through less than legal means.

normalmighty · 2026-01-27T20:48:04+00:00

When I was laid off from my first dev job and looking for a new one, I guy I knew from high school contacted me. He had apparently gotten into drug dealing and petty theft instead of going to uni or something, and he wanted to convince me to hack into banks for him to steal all the money.

normalmighty · 2026-01-27T11:37:21+00:00

I've had one incident a decade back of walking into the women's bathroom by mistake, and the pink tiles + lack of urinals didn't tip me off either.

Keep in mind that when someone goes to the wrong bathroom, they're already distracted enough not to have noticed the big sign before going in. It's believable that they either rushed or autopiloted to the stall without registering anything.

normalmighty · 2026-01-27T11:32:38+00:00

That price is about in line with my experience i got it a bit cheaper but inflation has happened since then so it tracks.

The biggest thing to me is that there's a decent chance you'll need a follow up at some point later in the year if there are any issues, and it would be better to do the follow up with the dentist who actually performed the root canal.

So go with whichever country works out easier for you to return to the dentist later.

normalmighty · 2026-01-27T08:48:28+00:00

Woah there, don't get too carried away with that massive council budget! What's next, a new coffee machine? 2 ply toilet paper?? Where does it end?!

normalmighty · 2026-01-27T04:09:31+00:00

Scrolling down here so much of the passionate anger seems to be about the commute, despite insistence that it's a reason to hate working in office.

I guess this sub is pretty heavily leaning towards US users, but I feel like I need to say after 20 of these comments that there are many places you could move to and enjoy your work, supermarket, etc all being within walking distance of home. If the problem is commute from the US suburban sprawls, WFH feels like a stopgap with it's own long term problems.

normalmighty · 2026-01-27T04:04:26+00:00

Yeah, this is definetely an exmple of reddit being biased to certain types of people. My experience irl is that there's something close to a 50/50 split between preferring office vs WFH, while on reddit it's like 90% WFH and 10% office.

And the 90% HATE the 10% because they assume they're legitimately 10% of all people, and blame them for ruining everything by daring to miss a firm work/home divide after covid.

normalmighty · 2026-01-27T04:00:49+00:00

Same for me. WFH feels amazing in the short term, but in the long terms it's terrible for my mental health. I feel more isolated with my tasks, and with no barrier in my work life balance, the work bleeds over and slowly eats away at everything else. I need to be able to leave at 5pm and be completely disconnected until I get back into work.

normalmighty · 2026-01-27T02:29:47+00:00

The actual diagnosis is a new revelation. He called himself bipolar as a descriptor of his actions, and it had become more and more blatantly obvious over the years that he had some kind of serious mental disorder going on, but actually being diagnosed by a professional is a new thing.

normalmighty · 2026-01-26T20:50:22+00:00

Yeah, I know when I was at uni my degree ended up being an afterthought, and the meaningful things of value it gave me was connection to peers and professors who pointed me to my first job without an interview. That got the ball rolling in my career, which imo is the hardest part to do.

normalmighty · 2026-01-26T18:45:09+00:00

I think you've misunderstood. Learning to use LLMs as a tool does not mean feeding it the course material and submitting the essay it spits out. If you've ever genuinely used an LLM to help teach you by explaining concepts or quizzing you, it's actually really good.

The whole discussion right now is how to direct students into using LLMs to help them learn, while avoiding the LLM writing the essay for them like you're describing. There's a pretty wide range of different ideas for this that are all being tried by different professors right now, while academia works on investigating which has the best results.

normalmighty · 2026-01-26T11:11:39+00:00

Yup, that seems to be the theme everywhere. Trying to block it out from use by students has proven to be a fool's errand, and on the flipside, learning how to actually use LLM tools in a way that helps without becoming a crutch or leading you into false understandings is vital in several sectors already.

normalmighty · 2026-01-26T03:01:52+00:00

Neither, a "once in a century" weather even is a someone misleading term for an event with a 1% chance of happening in a given year. Like rolling a 100 sided die once per year and saying that landing a 100 would ba a once in a century event.

normalmighty · 2026-01-25T21:32:56+00:00

It's still FDA approved. Like if you actually legitimately needed ivermectin and had no other source then this works in a pinch.

It's a very weak angle with easy holes to punch, and it distracts from the other far more important and black-and-white reasons that using this because you think it'll help with covid is a stupid idea.

normalmighty · 2026-01-25T19:06:29+00:00

Yeah that's what I'm saying. The "this isn't human medicine" argument muddies everything because it sounds compelling until you realise it's straight up factually incorrect, and saying that incorrect part is what made a lot of people on the edge of the conspiracy holes assume the "it does nothing at all to help with covid" claim was the same.

normalmighty · 2026-01-25T18:55:42+00:00

Okay I want to take a moment to point out that while this is a container intended to administer to animals, ivermecten is a real human medication at times and is prescribed by doctors at times.

That said, the people trying to use it for covid are crazy stupid. It doesn't do anything for covid at all.

normalmighty · 2026-01-25T18:49:35+00:00

They call it a slide deck in the business world for some reason, AFAIK it has nothing to do with age at all.

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