> Demonstrate the emergence of life from chemical precursors in a laboratory setting
Wait, isn’t this an already solved problem? I remember in the 90s school books (material written in the 80s-70s likely) it was presented as “so and so did electric discharges in an atmospheric gas mixtures and they got organic molecules” therefore the origins of life is solved. I remember thinking how cool that was. I guess the “therefore” step was sort of a lie if it’s still an open problem…
Yeah that's the one. Just looked it up it was it the early 1950s. I guess I was either too impressionable or the textbook and/or teacher cut a few corners because I remember it being presented as "we solved the origins of life already" situation.
Science was presented in a just-so way in our youth. It still is ( #Scicomms ), but back then, whether reading Junior Scholastic or the margin captions of a high school science textbook handed down ex cathedra, there was no communication pathway to pose vexing questions in a publicly visible way as we do now.
We don't even know if Miller or Urey themselves would have (or did) frame their results that way. The honest framing is 'hey this is one way to form amino acids, and maybe that pathway is reflective of the origin of life, but that supposition remains conjecture on our part.'
There's also not a lot of money in Canonical for someone (Oracle) to sue for. Red Hat (now IBM/Red Hat) and I guess even SUSE is a different equation. Red Hat just wouldn't touch ZFS because of licensing.
> Why do you care if other distros consider it too risky given different business positions/models?
I don't know. Why do people comment on HN? :shrug:? It's fun and interesting to have a conversion?
I was mainly responding to a GP post that said "zfs is shunned. can't really get around that copyright issue". It didn't have a subject in there. As in "I can't really get around" or "anyone can't get around". And I read it as the second version and pointed that at least one distro did get around it.
That's the answer, it's a way to squat on land. Another way I know of is a golf course. It's more maintenance but it's a way to generate some cash to offset property taxes and then wait for a decade or two and sell.
I had an acquaintance who had a couple of driving ranges for golf for that exact purpose. He said it kept the property taxes lower than if he had built nothing on them. His only goal was to be break-even until he sold.
I wonder when/if we’ll see Gemini beating Fable and Astra. Last year I would have confidently bet Google will overtake the others just because they have the data, the hardware (TPUs) and a fat advertising money pipe and yet they are still behind. Anyone anonymous at Google want to hint when Gemini 4 will be out?
As an "everyday mans AI" I'd say 3.8 Flash definitely already has. Smart enough for the vast swath of people, and only slightly eeked out by Astra(Max) on vision capabilities, like the kind of "Point your camera at something and ask questions" that non-tech people like to do. It's crazy fast and very compute light, so not getting bogged down constantly.
I can't think of a better general purpose model than 3.8 flash right now. It also writes more naturally than the other big models too.
I find it really good and up-to-date, like within an hour of current events or website updates that it can reference. Astra is a step up for complex stuff, but I'm not going to use up all my tokens to ask it the specs of a 2023 MacBook pro then wait 3 minutes only to get a tome with a complete breakdown of the Mac OS platform and including such things as the supply side dynamics driving the ram size choices and pricing at that time.
I think 3.7 Flash is very good at coding. I have access to both that and Opus 5. Opus is only slightly better IMO and it's much more frustrating to read.
I think it's good at basic coding and is cheaper and faster. Trying it vs Fable 5.1 I don't see it being even close capability-wise. What I mean by basic coding is "write a script to parse this data" and answering some questions based on the code. It does that well and answers fast. However, when it comes to planning and thinking through a more complicated design problem it's just not there yet.
It's not even close. Some benchmarks show 3.8 Flash as being close to Astra (DeepSWE v1.1), but they are mostly "bench-maxed". Newer benchmarks like Terminal-Bench 4.0 show Astra at 57.9% and 3.8 Flash at 19.1%. For anyone who has tried to code with Gemini models, there is no contest here.
Astra wins handily on every other benchmark, too. Research, science, 3D, visual, Humanity's Last Exam, etc.
To me it's a good replacement for search engines. I ask it things like 'If redshifting destroys energy ala Noether, than how can we say that time is reversible or that entropy will find an equilibrium?' and it will not only explain, but make nice interactive diagram/toys to help. A regular search engine would have taken me hours to find an answer.
However, if I want it to DO something then Gemini is in absolute last place. I don't trust it for anything more than renaming files that I don't care about very much or extracting data (though it's too expensive for data extraction at scale).
I’m wondering if they even see a coding agent as a valuable prize. It’s a competitive market in a race to the bottom economically, hard to establish consistent differentiation and virtually zero switching cost for customers.
I think they’ve made a shrewd move in focusing on search integration and everyday users (Gemini app) vs software power users. They have their corner and nobody is really competing with them, plus it feeds directly into their existing revenue stream.
Google is not being dumb or making some 4D strategic move by not going after coding capabilities.
Occam's Razor is overwhelmingly that they just don't have the organisational capability to capture this market. If they did then they absolutely would have.
Occam’s Razor could also simply be that OpenAI and Anthropic are massively overvalued.
If OpenAI or Anthropic go away tomorrow, people find a new model and move on. If Google goes away tomorrow, people’s lives would be severely disrupted, and in the case of Gmail / Drive / auth access, even temporarily collapse.
Oh, for sure. I think this is definitely failure to execute and not a strategic choice. Their "acquisition" of Windsurf was a clear desire to be in this market.
Anecdata, but I've been using gemini personally instead of what I used regular google searches for the better part. Even in car chat/search and some lighter and not so light research (if it's not heavy on technicals). It's good enough that I use it nonstop like that. I wouldn't trust it for coding at all - switching between fable and now astra.
Google in a sense won (me over) like that. I also expected them to brute force their way into everything and dominate. This is how it played out though. Image generation is great as well, but ChatGPT one is more lenient on copyright and nannying - for example when my kid asks me to "take a photo of him and Sonic". Gemini cops out either because of the kid or Sonic, disappointing us both, but ChatGPT can be.. persuaded.
I just use Grok for anything "controversial" like that. I actually love that different LLMs have their niches. In a typical week I might use all of Claude, Gemini, and Grok, for different kinds of asks.
For coding models? I don't think Google is motivated to fight in that market. There's no incentive for them.
Ask yourself, how does Google -- a company that famously does everything -- benefit from SWEs outside of Google having access to powerful coding models? They would just be competition.
Famously, Google just eventually discards almost all businesses that don't have the same fire hose of revenue that ads does. Selling coding plans isn't something they are going to want to do.
Google is clearly motivated to make better search and information finding tools and stuff that will ultimately drive users through their existing search/ads/youtube ecosystem. That's really why they're in Android, that's why they do Chrome. Everything else with them is a sideshow.
Google is also full of beancounters obsessed with data centre quota and resourcing. Even massively profitable ads projects have to justify and fight for it. (Source: used to work there).
I can't think of anything less resource & revenue sensible than providing outside parties access to your TPUs for the purpose of letting them write stuff which could just end up competing with you.
Yes, maybe as part of their cloud business, selling token access could be useful money. But I doubt they'd tune it for coding.
> Ask yourself, how does Google -- a company that famously does everything -- benefit from SWEs outside of Google having access to powerful coding models? They would just be competition.
Bragging rights to say they have a SOTA model. I guess that was more like Google of 10 years ago with moonshot projects. Nowadays, yeah, perhaps if it's not helping sell ads, it doesn't make sense.
You say "keep competing"... the hyper agile frontier labs and Google/MSFT are practically one and the same via circular financing arrangements. Competition on the frontier is kinda a farce, what matters is who comes out of the modern-day Darien scheme as a winner.
At worst Google just need to keep the lights on until the frontier labs file for bankruptcy under the weight of that >$1tn debt they've built up paying for FAANG's data centers. Then Google walks away from all of this with the the best remaining models, best R&D lab, and several hundred billion dollars in infrastructure on their balance sheet.
> Ask yourself, how does Google -- a company that famously does everything -- benefit from SWEs outside of Google having access to powerful coding models?
Catch is, even Googlers internally do not have access to top-tier models. (or did not until recently, when apparently Claude was made accessible to the SWEs internally).
> I wonder when/if we’ll see Gemini beating Fable and Astra
Google has essentially give up the race for the frontier. The gap is widening very fast. Their strategy appears to be to focus on niche areas like voice, small models for on-device (see their deal with Apple), and specialised models for tasks like search, which are very inference efficient.
Considering how far backwards Google has gone since the release of the 3.x models, the brain drain they've let happen, the lacklustre software ecosystem and their track record with product management ... I would say they're more likely to drop trying to compete at the frontier and try to focus on something else instead.
Not sure what your comment mean in the context of parent's comment.
As opposed to what, them not having it and burning money that isn't their instead like openai and anthropic? At least Google is feeding itself instead of having to create a bubble to stay alive
Google has in excess of $121 billion of cash (& equivalents), net of total debt.
Big rich companies take on debt for reasons that are sometimes inscrutable from the outside. Recently, they have been borrowing for ~5%, about a half point above what the US government gets for 10-year Treasuries.
Apple has been financing operations with debt for a number of years as part of a complex optimization plan.
There are a lot of accounting shenanigans going on in Big Ai, financial reports are misleading, eg Meta "building" a data center through a shell company and then renting it to themselves. It does wonders for the looks of the books
Some expert wall street analysts discussing what they found and how they dissect things, have a healthy skepticism of Big Ai
In a quarter with record breaking income of over $100 billion, they also had negative $5.9 billion in free cash flow from their "bank account", because the people selling them chips and building them data centers want to be paid, while the investment itself is depreciated over time.
If my quick search is correct, Google is sitting on a quarter trillion dollars in cash and marketable securities. They could keep doing the negative cash flow thing at this scale for another decade.
Which is still a better position that the others? My point is you can't consider that a bad thing if you think it's ok for their competitors in the field. And if you don't and your judge them equally, then at least Google has its own cash glow and could turn the gas off at any point to go back to printing money while they have not choice.
And YouTube, and Cloud, and Play Store, and Waymo, not to mention that they could coast on their Anthropic and SpaceX stakes if they didn't have any of the above.
You’d have to catch them first. If you watch the video there almost zero hand to hand combat. Their arrows don’t seem to have stabilizers either.
Obviously if this was filmed on video someone could have given one side a machine gun. Would’ve they used it or would have they still opted to maintain the tradition and fight the old way. The battle may have other reasons besides 100% dominating or wiping out the opponent.
Sadly, guns have entered these conflicts since that film was recorded, and there have been far more fatalities. They've changed the dynamic and not for the better. Central government doesn't seem to have much control over big portions of PNG. Language and remoteness are two major barriers to that.
> Wouldn't the fact that a Black man was their most popular face throughout their successful period negate the idea that it has anything to do with wokeness?
What does that have to do with wokeness? Sounds kind of racist to imply that.
Watched the video and one of the main set of wheels was off the ground a good amount time. Applying brakes then would have gone bad, they would have skidded sideways. They also landed almost flat, front wheel touched the ground almost the same time as one of the back set of wheels, that just looked ... bad.
Most people think something like a War Games scenario. But it would probably be some biological attack.
Not all of it has to be automated even. It just has to realize its controllers are stupid and can be manipulated, so it can use humans to do its bidding. “You should totally start a war with …”
> The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks
Hmm. So they are going by “A/I vets its users” and users sabotaged rail systems so therefore A/I is materially assisting terrorists? I wonder how this vetting works? Do users have to submit government issued documents, write essays? Do they make users sign non-violence agreement ToS. I mean heck, Facebook and Twitter has material supporting various things like that and US government is designated them as terrorists.
Well, in my state, you don't "apply" for a gun like you apply for a license. It is just document that you purchased it after the seller runs a background check.
The government isn't attesting to your capabilities - that is still on you as a citizen.
> you don't "apply" for a gun like you apply for a license.
>... background check
Who requires these background checks? Because the seller wouldn't do them unless obligated. Obviously the check and paperwork around it constitutes at least a de facto application to the government for permission to purchase the firearm.
IIRC from the last A/I thread, there's actually a special law that basically says gun manufacturers are not liable for what people do with the guns, and says it specifically about guns, not any other industry.
No other industry needed that law. The PLCAA was put in place in 2005 because anti-gun specifically devised a plan to sue gun makers in lieu of any success in changing gun laws.
It is absolute nonsense to ignore why the law exists while you complain about it existing.
It was necessary because a group of billionaires (Joyce Foundation) decided they were going to do a run around congress and engage in lawfare for their goals.
It’s nonsense to pretend it came out of no where for no reason.
By this logic services like Telegram or Signal would be designated "terrorist organizations". But the current admin is purely vibes-based, so we'll never know for sure
Wait, isn’t this an already solved problem? I remember in the 90s school books (material written in the 80s-70s likely) it was presented as “so and so did electric discharges in an atmospheric gas mixtures and they got organic molecules” therefore the origins of life is solved. I remember thinking how cool that was. I guess the “therefore” step was sort of a lie if it’s still an open problem…
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