This sounds hilarious, how many physical items are we talking? Like his whole front porch full up of contract boxes?

The documents pack is like an A4 folder 1cm thick. He received close to 100 in one day. Enough for his mailbox to get full and for the postie to dump most of it on the lawn

Great, electrical and mechanical engineers are already underpaid, under appreciated and overworked.

I’ve always found it amusing that lawyers and accountants flash their license around with pride, put it in their email signatures, etc. and it provides authority for them. When people see chartered lawyer or accountant, they respect that person and take their advice.

An engineering license, on the other hand, is so rarely talked about and never quoted in email signatures and the like. And even as a chartered engineer, people really just treat you like a mechanic or a trade and mostly ignore your advice anyway. Yet, it takes the longest to get, and has the most exams/hardest subjects, except for Doctors.

Anything to make an Engineering license worth more is good in my books. Besides, in my experience ChatGPT gives wrong advice for engineering around 50% of the time and therefore probably has no business giving it.

1.35x speed up in single core versus M3 Max. Insane. Everyone else has failed to bump single core performance in years. Where are these single core gains coming from?

AMD, Apple, Arm, and Qualcomm have increased single-core performance every generation. I guess Intel has been stalled due to their fab problems.

Waiting for the first pro line phone with both the Apple modem and Apple wifi/BT stack in it. Battery life is always a struggle when the phone gets older.

Exactly. I guess it’s time to replace my trusty iphone se 3rd gen. It’s been a great phone though, best one i ever had.

Why not replace the battery? It's fairly cheap.

If all of the AI providers just went bankrupt it would be a fairly solid 1 step back, 2 steps forward for humanity.

We weren’t ready for it. And degrading world conditions and crazy leadership make it scary to be a civilian in a world with highly capable AI. One that will soon contain AI-powered terrestrial robots akin to something out of Terminator (<2 years).

Besides, without AI we’d probably invest in net positive short term objectives that redistribute wealth, like clean tech.

(Extremely unpopular opinion because at least half or more of HN are probably working in AI)

Somewhere along the way we forgot that technology was supposed to serve us, not the shareholders.

I’m still not convinced even computing was a particularly good idea. It has enabled prosperity in some areas, like aiding drug research. It has also massively corroded the social fabric.

The productivity gains from computing were never reflected in wages. In the latter half of last century you could buy a home and support a family on one income. Now, you need two average incomes to even start to think about having a family. And then you surrender your children to be raised by someone else because you have to go to work.

Are computers serving us, or are we serving them?

> It has enabled prosperity in some areas, like aiding drug research.

At first I scoffed at your idea that computing itself may not have been a good advancement.

And then I saw your example of where computers have helped and I’m wondering that even there, did the lives saved and the quality of life improvements from the accelerated drug research, outnumber the lives lost and the worsened lives quality of life because of hundreds of millions of people’s work now becoming being stuck in a chair behind a monitor and keyboard all day?

Working at a computer isn't a worse quality of life any more than any other job. It's actually pretty nice versus being a plumber or something. No sewage in the workplace.

It's not that we are all fans of AI, it's that it's career suicide to ignore AI. If AI were gone for everybody that might be a net positive, but if it exists, it needs to get into the hands of as many as possible else wealth and power will concentrate even greater than it is now.

Working in "AI" was much more fun before the current hype cycle...

It's definitely turned into another Eternal September of everyone and their brother pretending they've worked in AI for all of human history. I would welcome another long winter

I upvoted you, and mostly agree with you, but: as much as I love using strong small local models sometimes a commercial 'frontier' model is very useful (for me).

I deleted my free OpenAI account (I paid for it until a year ago) and just started a $20/month Anthropic account. My one-year prepaid Gemini account will expire in two months and I will decide then to keep one of Anthropic or Gemini.

Once again: I agree that super-spending on super scaler data centers is a net negative for humanity. For me it is not a matter of price: I am happy paying $20/month and only using energy guzzling models occasionally when I really need them. Sort of like recycling to lesson our burden on the environment: try to minimize AI energy and resource use, but still get work done.

EDIT: we can also use LLMs more efficiently: build software composed of small well tested libraries. It is more energy efficient to write and debug little 200 line libraries than soaking up large projects in your context. Also, working on small composable libraries works better with smaller open models like qwen3.5:35b.

> we can also use LLMs more efficiently: build software composed of small well tested libraries. It is more energy efficient to write and debug little 200 line libraries than soaking up large projects in your context.

So, NPM? In reality AI is making this LESS likely to happen. It's easier to write a small utility function with AI then find and use a library these days

This might be preferable to the ever expanding tangled dependency graph and associated supply chain risk. OTOH, perhaps said graph can be reasonably wrangled with LLMs and enable safe small library re-use?

For what it's worth, I work in AI and I really hate it and want it to fail :)

I’ll admit when it first came out I hated the Gemini summary. It hallucinated a lot. Back then it was useless.

But now I don’t mind it: it’s lightning fast (for an LLM capable of mid level reasoning), but more importantly unlimited and free. And it puts search results alongside the summary so I can ignore it if I like. These days I probably use it on around 90% of searches.

Titles like this just reiterate that people don’t take systems engineers/ing seriously.

It's clearly titled by someone who doesn't know what systems engineering is.

This is what’s gonna be in the brain of the robot that ends the world.

The sheer speed of how fast this thing can “think” is insanity.

I’m convinced all these blog posts on AI productivity are some kind of high level propaganda trying to create a Folie à deux that AI is much better than it is.

The worst part is that it’s so convincing: not only does everyone who can’t make it work feel gaslit about it, but some people even pretend that it works for them so they don’t feel like they’re missing out.

I remember the last time this happened and people were convinced (for like 2 years) that a gif of an ape could somehow be owned and was worth millions of dollars.

It certainly feels like a lot of the crypto bros have moved on to being AI bros.

I'm chalking my poor experience to being too cheap to pay $200 a month for Claude Max 20x so I can run the multiple agents that need to supervise each other.

Yes, and I’m convinced AI companies either pay or brainwash these people to put out blog posts like this to spread the idea that it actually works. It doesn’t.