Yes, the MBAs won’t like it. But maybe, once in a while, companies should do things because they are cool and not because it clears some threshold on a magic spreadsheet.
I’d even settle for Apple opening up the Music app so I can upload music to my iPhone from Linux. But once again, that doesn’t make the spreadsheet sparkle.
iTunes Match (these days it's just under the umbrella of 'iCloud Music Library', I believe) is probably the greatest value Apple offers.
I have a local collection of over 30,000 mp3s, about half of which is not 'matched', and a sizable chunk of which is not available on streaming anywhere, and I have it on all my devices seamlessly, included with the price of an Apple Music subscription. (which I also use for convenience for listening to things I don't have my own copy of yet).
You might be surprised. Companies like HiBy have a rather healthy music player lineup[0], where "fewer distractions" is an explicit marketing point.
Similarly, despite rather capable smartphones being available for as little as $100, the "feature phone" market is still doing quite well - and it definitely isn't just the grannies who are buying them!
Steve Jobs famously launched the smartphone industry as "We are launching three things: an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. These are not three separate devices. It is one device, and we are calling it iPhone." Not having to carry a whole bunch of separate devices on a day-to-day basis was groundbreaking, and it was immediately clear that the synergy between the until-now separate features would open up a lot of new possibilities.
But since then the smartphone has mutated from a device of convenience into a grotesque attention-stealing privacy-invading Everything Device, which is used primarily as a proxy through which companies are doing massive harm to our society. For many people smartphones have become a necessary evil, and an increasingly-large group (many of whom Gen Z or Gen Alpha!) is deliberately refusing them out of self-preservation.
Sure, the market for a modern iPod refresh might not be gigantic, but I reckon it is definitely larger than the market for Apple Vision, or Meta's pervert glasses. The demand exists, the question is just whether it is large enough for Apple to care - especially when it means undermining their own golden goose app ecosystem.
> But since then the smartphone has mutated from a device of convenience into a grotesque attention-stealing privacy-invading Everything Device, which is used primarily as a proxy through which companies are doing massive harm to our society. For many people smartphones have become a necessary evil, and an increasingly-large group (many of whom Gen Z or Gen Alpha!) is deliberately refusing them out of self-preservation.
Right. The Jobs vision was still an accessory. An advanced and staggeringly capable one, but an accessory nonetheless. It hadn't yet become an inescapable, addictively-designed pillar of daily life.
People are also coming back around to the idea that convenience isn't the only thing that matters and that a "split device" lifestyle can even provide hobbies with associated communities for those who partake. Curating a music collection comes naturally after picking up a dedicated offline music player and getting into photography more seriously follows buying an old secondhand standalone digital camera, for example.
Canada only enforces the parts of its Charter the current government feels like, and actively does the opposite of its Charter when the current government feels like it.
It sounds like you’re still writing code by hand and reading and reviewing code.
For that any decent model from the past year will do.
If you want to forget how to write code and not read generated code, then you need a very good frontier model, ideally one from 6-12 months in the future.
> It sounds like you’re still writing code by hand and reading and reviewing code.
This is such a naive, baseless opinion.
Nowadays any AI coding assistant service supports or can be used with sub-agent orchestration frameworks.
If you are in the business of software factories, you can use the cheapest models and even local models to handle some if not all tasks in the orchestration chain.
Adding tests or executing tests (unit, integration, UI, you name it) doesn't require a cutting edge frontier model. Neither does refactoring. Neither does identifying call stacks. Neither does planning a changeset.
You have your specialized subagents, you put together a small orchestrator subagent that handles feedback loops and handoffs,and you throw it at tasks.
For the past couple of months, most of the code I write is not code per se, it's subtask orchestrators. And unlike the old "only Opus is passable" days, the cheapest models do get the job done.
I used to read the code till around May. Now I don't. Instead I validate behavior. And have multiple LLMs verify that the code implements my handwritten spec.
MiMo 2.5/2.6, MuseSpark 1.3, DeepSeek V4/4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash are perfectly capable of following my spec and then poking holes in the implementation till there are none left.
Speaking of horses... the internets tells me that the US horse population didn't peak until 1920 (at 25 million), so in 1908 they were still doing great, even though horses were beginning to be replaced by cars in the early 1900s. Millions were killed during WW1 though, which might have been avoided if ICE cars and trucks had been more advanced earlier.
Read the comments: it's people angry that AI is everywhere and pessimistic about its current and future use. Not in the "it'll become too powerful" sense but in the "it's now and always will be far less useful than people think" sense.
This is the least pro-AI tech community on the internet.
Some years ago when I was more willing to waste time, I used to argue with people on here who disabled javascript in their web browsers and complained that websites didn't work. That wasn't the dark ages... it was around covid era times. HNers are often proud luddites, or at least proud tech minimalists.
Read the rest of the comments. There are massive AI boosters on here - strong enough boosters that it seems legitimate to wonder whether they are shills. There are also massive skeptics.
It might be that OP is implying most of the boosters are bots themselves. I don't doubt it: AI equals money and ycombinator is a startup accelerator. I think this might just be a Brandolini's Law thing, as the "indifferent and/or against" people are just too goddamn tired of it all.
I have a 20x sub and it feels like the 20$ sub eight months ago. I can easily burn it in an afternoon, and I don't have many projects.
According to API usage, they cut you off at around the equivalent of 900$ of API usage, whatever that means. It's very difficult to track all this, and very subjective. What validates me is that of all my friends I am not the only one.
I can only imagine the 100$ users must be feeling the rug being pulled even harder.
Anyway, this has led me to get a Spark, and a second is on the way.
For me Sol is less efficient than Astra - Sol makes many avoidable mistakes and has issues with context compaction - sometimes it goes haywire after a couple compactions.
Agreed on the “being dumbed down” observation. It appears they’re most powerful at release time and then are gradually “optimized” so every new model feels more powerful. But there’s no evidence on routing to a deployment with other weights. It would be plausible to do so though at least at peak times.
What really is fun is when the opposite of the public outcry about purported distillation happens - when Astra in Codex suddenly responds in Chinese. Now that is fun. Wonder what it’s routing to.
Weird. That's definitely not my experience. On the $100 plan and I can burn my entire week's budget in a few hours easily with Astra. It's borderline unusable.
People often use a bunch of subagents, poor context management (though Codex's tight context limits and constant compaction tend to mitigate this), a bunch of projects at once, etc., as well as not using workflows that do heavy planning once up front and then consult it rather than thinking endlessly about what to do during the implementation part.
It's also the case that working on massive codebases is just a different beast. If they've been slopmining a monorepo for months with 200x, then their codebase is probably Lovecraftian at that point and requiring extensive effort to iterate on.
i am on just the $20 plan and I am using it literally almost all day, 2-3 different projects at the same time, and I am failing to run out! I am naturally always trying to be efficient, its a weird personality trait I have, where I don't try to but I willingly choose to use GPT-6-Luna most of the time now (well 5.6 before that) More Sol lately and for most tasks.. they seem to have the same output, its only super hard things where I kick it up to Astra.
I am so used to doing planning with the best models and switching to Luna, Deepseek 4.1 Flash (really, the cheapest model, and often much better results for lots of things) really people are limiting themselves when they only use one company's models. You really gain a TON by treating each one more like different people with diverse range of personalities, passions, skills, and knowledge.
Today, ChatGPT desktop app was tasked with making 7 variations of new versions of some existing websites of mine - and they all kinda looked the same. I did get lazy with it though.... I can solve that probably, with skills/changing the default frontend skills but also just sending the same task to Reasonix Code w/ deepseek, and some other models, gets some good wide range of outputs.
I strongly agree. Check out the Codex subreddit. Many empirical examples of Astra silently downgrading the models. One found Astra was silently using Luna Max (but still billing for Astra).
Even when I try to stick with Sol X/High, my limits are at best half of what they were before Astra launched, and the intelligence has declined markedly.
I cancelled my $100 plan. This is absolutely absurd and frankly unusable now.
it's per week. I don't use the mainstream harness, skills, agents.md, subagents, orchestration and mcp, so the the thing does what I ask instead of going into rabbit holes and doing coffee machine chatter with it's shaitan friends
Entirely depends on the work asked and the repo involved.
When I’m doing work on a repo where I’m implementing a standard and the agents have to read the standard to keep from hallucinating my usage skyrockets.
Hell this changes depending on which language I’m working with.
The question you asked was whether the AIs could prove the thing "in a vacuum", without making any use of previous human work. "Close to being solved" is a statement about all the previous human work that mathematicians might have used to do it in five years.
I didn't mean that as "we need hyper-intelligence." I mean that going all the way from nothing to singular, dual, plural grammatical numbers attached to particular nouns to abstract one, two, three, many to zero, one, two, three... to rationals to... is a very long way.
Because the bounded universe creates bounds on what the intelligences within it can conceive of as mathematics.
We can conceive of lots of mathematics that our own universe doesn't necessarily support. But only that much and no more: we're still made of stuff inside the universe, and so are our tools, so there are upper limits on our conception.
Mathematics that our universe does not support is still mathematics. Also you're viewing this through a human lens. How do you know it doesn't support what you think it doesn't support? Mathematics after all is a very human pursuit. Some alien species may have started off with ternary or even continuous logic. We have no counterexamples to show that that is beyond our universe.
Bounds do not imply bounds. There are an infinite number of numbers between zero and one. Heck, with our finite minds in finite time we have created uncountable infinities!
> There probably is a finite amount of math to be done
> The universe is bounded by rules, as far as we can tell, and not a lot of them
Respectfully, this is not a useful frame for the discussion. Nobody is expecting to reach the limit you have noted either with or without the assistance of LLMs. So there is always more math that could be done.
The universe imposes strict limits on the math that can exist within it, and certain broader limits on the math the creatures and well-organized sand within the universe can conceive of in the first place, whether or not it can maybe exist in other universes.
At those levels math and physics are the same bound: the bound of things the universe allows to be conceived of inside it.
It’s possible the math our monkey brains + sand can ever conceive of in this universe is a low and accessible amount.
> The universe imposes strict limits on the math that can exist within it, and certain broader limits on the math the creatures and well-organized sand within the universe can conceive of in the first place, whether or not it can maybe exist in other universes.
When you have a moment, please reference some proofs supporting this.
There are lots of thoughts you’re not biologically capable of thinking. That means the list of thoughts you’re capable of thinking is finite. That means the amount of math you’re capable of discovering, even if you lived forever, is finite.
That’s true of all humans and all constructs.
So however much math there is to discover, that’s the finite subset you’ll ever have access to.
It’s hard to prove what thoughts no human and no construct is capable of generating, but surely there are some, and it’s possible or even likely some of those are math-related.
Even if we accept that there are "lots of thoughts" we're not capable of thinking (though I wonder how you would define a thought if not as something that you can think), it still does not follow that the "amount of math" (as if it's a definite quantity) that one could discover is necessarily finite, if you lived forever.
By analogy, the "amount of math" we can possibly discover could still be countably infinite even if the space of all possible thoughts would be uncountably infinite. Countably infinite is still plenty big, and it is certainly not finite.
To put what I said another way, math may be infinite in principle, but the creatures in our universe can only conceive of or perceive so much of it: a finite amount.
We (or our constructs) can plausibly mine all there is and then there's no more that's physically possible for us or our constructs to mine within the universe in which we exist.
If an ant can't conceive of or perceive trigonometry that doesn't mean trigonometry doesn't exist. But if neither an ant nor a human nor any creature or construct or technology inside the current universe, now or ever, can conceive of or perceive trigonometry, then we might as well call it non-existent. It may exist: but we'd literally never know it and neither would our constructs or space aliens or inter-dimensional aliens, or their constructs, etc.
Say that there's a level of mathematics at which a blerg is a zorg, but our universe includes neither blergs nor zorgs and no intelligences in our universe can conceive of blergs/zorgs because that would require having evolved outside our universe... in that case we can consider our universe's mathematics solved without it needing to work down to the blerg and zorg level.
The natural numbers are countably infinite. For each n ∈ ℕ, there is a proof by reflexivity that n = n. Hence there are countably infinitely many such proofs, one for each natural number.
I didn’t demand anything. I requested some proofs since this thread is quite literally about a claim that requires proofs. As evidenced by the further comments in the thread. If you disapprove of the conversation, please feel free to use the tools and move on. No hard feelings!
Although I can see them selling an original 2007 iPhone Anniversary Edition, fully upgraded under the hood and with a modern screen/camera/wifi/5G
But I'm only saying that because I don't like giant phones: I'm in the 2% minority.
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