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Two MAJOR issues with your argument.

> where every person can ask a doctor their questions 10 times a day and instantly get an accurate response.

Why in god's name would you need to ask a doctor 10 questions every day? How is this in any way germane to this issue?

In any first-world country you can get a GP appointment free of charge either on the day or with a few days' wait, depending on the urgency. Not to mention emergency care / 112 any time day or night if you really need it. This exists and has existed for decades in most vaguely social-democratic countries in the world (but not only those). So you can get professional help from someone, there's no (absurd) false choice between either "asking the stochastic platitude generator" and "going without healthcare".

But I know right, a functioning health system with the right funding, management, and incentives! So boring! Yawn yawn, not exciting. GP practices don't get trillions of dollars in VC money.

> Ask an LLM, which gets you 80-90% of the way there.

This is such a ridiculous misrepresentation of the current state of LLMs that I don't even know how to continue a conversation from here.


> In any first-world country you can get a GP appointment free of charge

Are you really under the assumption that this is a first-world perk?


Honestly that kind of straw man is about equally as grating as the "string theory critics" that watched 1 Sabine Hossenfelder video. And just as uninteresting.

There was a well-publicised "Claude plays Pokémon" stream where Claude failed to complete Pokemon Blue in spectacular fashion, despite weeks of trying. I think only a very gullible person would assume that future LLMs didn't specifically bake this into their training, as they do for popular benchmarks or for penguins riding a bike.

If they game the pelican benchmark, it’d be pretty obvious.

Just try other random, non-realistic things like “a giraffe walking a tightrope”, “a car sitting at a cafe eating a pizza”, etc.

If the results are dramatically different, then they gamed it. If they are similar in quality, then they probably didn’t.


> as they do for popular benchmarks or for penguins riding a bike.

Citation?


While it is true that model makers are increasingly trying to game benchmarks, it's also true that benchmark-chasing is lowering model quality. GPT 5, 5.1 and 5.2 have been nearly universally panned by almost every class of user, despite being a benchmark monster. In fact, the more OpenAI tries to benchmark-max, the worse their models seem to get.

Hm? 5.1 Thinking is much better than 4o or o3. Just don't use the instant model.

5.2 is a solid model and I'm actually impressed with M365 copilot when using it.

I use this all the time. It's features like these that sell Rust for me honestly; even if you wrapped your whole program in `unsafe` it would still be a massively better language than C++ or C.

C++ lambdas can be used to achieve a similar result, not as pretty though https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines... But in general I agree!

The fact that you can't return from there makes for a huge difference, though,

Many languages use this idiom. Some popular ones even. So while it's good that Rust joined them, it's hardly a differentiator.

It's a differentiator wrt C and C++, is what I said.

Yes, sadly this isn't a part of standard C or C++.

It is available as a language extension in Clang and GCC and widely used (e.g. by the Linux kernel).

Unfortunately it is not supported by the third major compiler out there so many projects can't or don't want to use it.


This is meaningless. The benchmarks are (1) run in github actions, (2) include file and console IO, and (3) are compiled with different compiler flags...

It is meaningful as an indication of a realistic developer setup rather than a fine-tuned setup you'll only see in a HPC context.

Exactly.

Also, winners don’t make excuses.

(Not even being snarky. You have to spiritually accept that as a fact if you are in the PL perf game.)


It's certainly not meaningful of anything in the first place, since it only tests codegen for a sequence of floating point calculations, which is hardly a representative workload for anything. Even if it were, using an unreliable virtualised environment only introduces noise, especially in the presence of syscalls... So it's worthless even if the entire purpose was to evaluate how fast floating point sums and divisions run in a CI server x)

It's exhausting getting "normies" to care about that. Frankly that ship has sailed, on a cultural level. Things that were unthinkable 20 years ago are just... yeah that's normal whatever.

"normies" are dying out. Most of the younger generation grew up chronically online.

Those are the normier of all.

When you have trillions of dollars being poured into your company by the financial system, and when furthermore there are no repercussions for behaving however you please, you tend not to care about that sort of "waste".

Hardly. Hundreds of millions of "normies" want a browser that just "gets rid of ads and spam and stuff". If ff can be that go-to browser, they have hundreds of millions of potential users.

Potential users are not users, and firefox can't be that browser. Actually that browser is brave, and it also doesn't have hundred of millions of users. You can't fight defaults browsers, people don't care.

I don't get this dark/pessimistic/Firefox's so done view many people love to harp. Do we want Firefox to return, or to die? We should decide and act accordingly.

Telling Firefox to not to move and get out of the place where it currently is a great contradiction in itself.

Many potential Chrome users were not users, and now they are. You can change public opinion by putting your money where your mouth is, and being persistent about it.

Also, let's not forget that Firefox is kinda preventing itself being detected via standard mechanisms so global analytics show its numbers a bit low than the reality, as well.


Many potential Chrome users were not users, and then android happened. I'll believe firefox has a shot to become mainstream when they do something similar. Until them, keep your users or alienate them and disappear.

I'll agree to disagree here and will leave to get a fresh mug of coffee.

Unless we meet in another thread, merry Christmas and happy new year in advance.


> Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.

The confidence with which people say these things...

s/AI/NFT and I've heard this exact sentence many times before.


NFT was always a meme and crypto has proven its staying power.

Gambling has also proven its staying power. A low trust society and some early coin explosions will do that. I don't think its staying power is here in a healthy way, personally.

Crypto has proven that it can bribe governments into pouring tax money into it. It still hasn't shown any use.

Thats not a reason for crypto being useless, anything can bribe corrupt governments to pour tax money into it.

Crypto has shown people are willing to use it as a currency for investment and day to day transactions. Its held value for a significant amount of time. The tech is evolving still and people see a lot of value in having a currency that operates outside of Governments in a decentralized way even if some people will misuse that freedom.


> day to day transactions

Where is this happening?


Money laundering? Certainly.

Black market goods? Of course.

Avoiding taxation? Absolutely.

Day to day purchases? Not that I've seen.


Crypto is going to be a new settlement layer thats it. You'll use stripe and they will settle it on their public chain. You are free to use the chain directly but no real consumer is going to do that.

NFT was a meme in "People are going to buy my jpeg"

But as a protocol it has legs and is still used under the hood in projects.

Cryptokitties was always the best monetisation use case for NFTs, and its still going.


The metaverse is clearly the future. Zuckerberg said so, after all.

Browsers without metaverse integration will be a non-starter.


Hacker News was borderline insufferable during the 2022/23 NFT craze when all the startups, investments, and headlines were going into whatever new disruption NFTs/blockchain were allegedly going to cause.

At least with AI I do get some value out of asking Gemini questions. But I hardly need or want my web browser to be a chatbot interface.


Comparing LLMs to NFT isn't fair. Being able to talk to you computer and have it understand you and even do the things you ask is literally StarTrek technology.

I've never seen a technology so advanced be so dismissed before.


> C++ has std::bitset and std::vector

Notably, this is not the case. C++ std::vector is specialised for bools to pack bits into words, causing an untold array (heh) of headaches.

And "wasteful" is doing a lot of lifting here. In terms of memory usage? Yes. In terms of CPU? The other way around.


> In terms of CPU? The other way around.

That depends on your architecture and access pattern. In case of sequential access, packed bools may perform better due to arithmetic being usually way cheaper than memory operations.


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