> The fundamental challenge in AI for the next 20 years is avoiding extinction.
That's a weird thing to end on. Surely it's worth more than one sentence if you're serious about it? As it stands, it feels a bit like the fearmongering Big Tech CEOs use to drive up the AI stocks.
If AI is really that powerful and I should care about it, I'd rather hear about it without the scare tactics.
Also "my product will kill you and everyone you care about" is not as great a marketing strategy as you seem to imply, and Big Tech CEOs are not talking about risks anymore. They currently say things like "we'll all be so rich that we won't need to work and we will have to find meaning without jobs"
What makes it a scare tactic? There are other areas in which extinction is a serious concern and people don't behave as though it's all that scary or important. It's just a banal fact. And for all of the extinction threats, AI included, it's very easy to find plenty of deep dive commentary if you care.
There's arguably more dread and quiet constrained horror in With Folded Hands ... (1947)
Despite the humanoids' benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life.
No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited. Humans who resist the Prime Directive are taken away and lobotomized, so that they may live happily under the direction of the humanoids.
This hardly disproves the point: no one is taking this topic seriously. They're just making up a hostile scenario from science fiction and declaring that's what'll happen.
Lesswrong looks like a forum full of terminally online neckbeards who discovered philosophy 48 hours ago, you can dismiss most of what you read there don't worry
If only they had discovered philosophy. Instead they NIH their own philosophy, falling into the same ditches real philosophers climbed out of centuries ago.
At slow, manageable tempos, you can afford to use motions that don't scale to fast tempos. If you only ever play "what you can manage" with meticulous, tiny BPM increments, you'll never have to take the leap of faith and most likely will hit a wall, never getting past like 120-130 BPM 16ths comfortably. Don't ask how I know this.
What got me past that point was short bursts at BPMs way past my comfort zone and building synchrony _after_ I stumbled upon more efficient motions that scaled. IIRC, this is what Shawn Lane advocated as well.
I recommend checking out Troy Grady's (Cracking The Code) videos on YouTube if you're interested in guitar speed picking. Troy's content has cleared up many myths with an evidence-based approach and helped me get past the invisible wall. He recently uploaded a video pertaining to this very topic[0].
> What got me past that point was short bursts at BPMs way past my comfort zone and building synchrony _after_ I stumbled upon more efficient motions that scaled.
This is actually pretty close to what Stetina says. I just probably didn’t do a good job expressing it.
You’re oscillating above and below the comfort zone and that iteration like you say affords insights from both sides, and eventually the threshold grows.
Depends on the instrument. For wind instruments, the motions basically don’t change, and your focus is on synchronizing your mouth with your hands. Tonguing technique is different at high speed but you would typically practice with the same technique at low speed when learning a fast piece.
But the motions do change, at very slow tempos you can move basically one finger at a time, at faster tempos you have simultaneously overlapping motions.
On a trumpet? A clarinet? No, the motions don't simultaneously overlap. The fingering mechanics are slightly different at speed, but you would still start slow while using the higher speed mechanics and tonguing technique, not jump into high speed practice first.
No one is saying not to practice slow first. This advice is specifically for intermediate or advanced students who are putting a focus on developing speed specifically. Practice slow first, increase tempo slowly next, but when you hit a plateau, you need to add some repetitions that are well outside your comfort zone. You need to feel what it feels like to play fast, then clean it up.
It seems like this is a far more time efficient methodology to build speed on guitar, I do not know why it wouldn’t apply to other instruments like trumpet.
I agree. I like Lobsters but the political brigading is unfortunate and the moderation seems to favor one side over the other. That almost sours the whole experience, but I've learned to hide low quality drama posts and move on.
Having participated in both sites for over a decade, I disagree.
Lobste.rs was pitched as having more open moderation with a public moderation log, but in practice it's mostly one moderator running the show and deleting comments they don't like. There have been some notable incidents over the years where relatively benign comments were used as justification to ban people, the original comments deleted, and then the moderators come in to provide an alternate story of what happened. If you step out of line and question that narrative, you could find yourself silenced as well. Long term users know how and where to toe the line, as well as which topics to avoid completely unless you want to get that famous pop-up that shames you for having your comments downvoted and ends with an invitation to delete your account.
The moderators on Lobste.rs also weave their narrative into the fabric of the site in unavoidable ways. For example, you can't post anything related to LLMs without tagging it "vibecoding". Most of the articles are not about vibecoding, but they've decided that everything related to LLMs is "vibecoding" and therefore that tag is your only option. Don't think you can tag those stories as "AI" because that's wrong and they'll change it to "vibecoding". It's a silly decision that users have been carefully complaining about for a long time but the message from on top is that LLMs are to be sneered at as "vibecoding" and therefore that's the only permissible narrative. You don't see anything like that coming out of HN, for all it's imperfections.
I've found that the VSCode GitHub Copilot extension defaults to Claude Sonnet 4.0 (in agent mode) in all new workspaces. It's the first thing I check now, but I imagine a lot of people just roll with it, especially if they use inline completions where it might not be obvious what model is being used.
I second this. I had a tendency to get stuck watching YouTube videos before I hid all algorithmic recommendations and the Home page with Unhook. I can finally use YouTube without getting distracted, and there's no way I'm going back.
I just wish I had an addon like this for, well, everything. The browser is such a great platform because you can have this much control over your experience--no such luck with mobile apps.
That'd open a whole new can of worms. Browsers are already gargantuan pieces of software even with the relatively primitive tags we have today. We don't need to further argue with each other what the <toc> tag should look and behave like, deal with unforeseen edge cases and someone's special use cases which end up requiring them to implement the whole thing with <ol>s and <li>s anyway.
Then let the edge cases use <ol> and <li>, and in some sense all those website style simplifiers that comes built-in with Safari will just have to deal with those edge cases. Similarly we have a built-in date picker, and if you don't think it's good enough then build a better one.
I feel like that's more of an issue with the examples and LLMs? Discounting a framework just because it has ever increasing, completely optional capabilities doesn't compute to me. I'm not convinced there's a real problem.
The problem comes in when the complexity is both not optional and not rational.
Hooks do not work as real functions. They are magic. Why are they magic? I don't know, they certainly don't need to be. What state do they change? I don't know. Why do they look pure but actually mutate the application states? I don't know.
Why is react not reactive? Why is it if I change state the entire website rerenders? I don't know. React has a virtual dom. It knows when I change state because I have to tell it, manually. And then... It doesn't use those.
But it's okay, because you can `useMemo`. Why do I have to do that? I don't know.
Evidently I don't have to do that, because react has a compiler that does it automatically now. Why can't react just do it? I don't know. Clearly it's possible. And also every other framework does it.
There are real functional libraries like Effect, pretend functional library like React and just honest old style library like MobX. I think I know my preferred style.
That's a weird thing to end on. Surely it's worth more than one sentence if you're serious about it? As it stands, it feels a bit like the fearmongering Big Tech CEOs use to drive up the AI stocks.
If AI is really that powerful and I should care about it, I'd rather hear about it without the scare tactics.
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