alt Hacker News"This is by far the best time ever to be alive."
I appreciate the enthusiasm. I'm not sure I agree. Especially since this was a SWE and not an archeologist / anthropologist announcing this (especially if the goal is to understand and preserve history -- not get headlines for AI).
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That line also made me do a double-take. No doubt this is cool and all, but that's a strange blanket take away.
I completely agree. My dominating feeling was nausea. At the waste of electricity spent on this. At the callous devaluing of actual expertise. At potentially ruining the opportunity for a much more deserving person to make such a discovery.
It's like an arrogant teenage boy showing up to an Easter egg hunt and grabbing all the chocolate faster than the little kids and demanding everyone tell him to great he is.
If you're a Google SWE with 7 figure comp, doing experiments with agent swarms you don't need to pay for, with healthy case of Dunning-Kruger... then maybe it is.
But everyone's been fired and are out of jobs -- how is this the best time to be alive?
Life is surrounded by nuances. The COVID pandemic was the best time to be alive if you were a tech worker and your family was safe and healthy. Now COVID is over, so does most of the value of our intellectual work.