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Blood cells from 80-year-old donor become stem cells with molecular age under 20 (doi.org)
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Sounds like the immortal jellyfish solution. We squeeze entropy out of our DNA by creating a new fresh cell (ovum) that’s very sensitive to genetic defects, meaning if it survives it’s probably good. The jellyfish just shrinks back to a single cell (presumably with some mechanism for keeping the ‘best’ cell) to reset the damage. This is doing the same thing, but piece by piece. Edit: And wow, that abstract appears to have eaten an entire thesaurus.
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It may be a dumb reason to do it, but recently I've started to focus on my health a bit more because of news like this (more exercise and healthier food). The thinking is, if we find a way to massively extend the human lifespan/reverse aging I want to live long enough for that. I'd be pissed if we as humanity solved aging and I die just before that, not taking any chances.
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lol, I am kind of in the same mode of thought but just kind of expect it not to happen. There was a really shitty movie starring Jared Leto I think about the same problem. Being the last guy to miss out on being immortal
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Mr. Nobody is not a bad movie!
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Because this is the worst timeline, we're getting cell reprogramming used to grow artificial brains to run AI workloads before functional aging remediation... let alone GTA VI.
My nightmare is that we solve aging just in time for the Baby Boomers to live forever.
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not if every other generation also lives long enough to become the baby boomers.
If something like this ever becomes a practical application on the organismal level, the octogenarian dictators of the world will rejoice.
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An individual pancreas cell discovering the secret to immortality is a triumph for that cell, and a real bad thing for the body. This is like that, but for the entire human population.
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Even if medical science one day eliminates aging and disease, nobody is going to live forever—eventually you’ll succumb to an accident, or war, or homicide.
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Putin keeps talking about living forever, which makes his nuclear threats a bit less worrisome.
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If you're listening just covered this the other day, they did a good job, worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQFE_3Mr4yQ (If you're listening is generally pretty good)
Eh, we might see some benefit to leaders having a reason to care about stuff 10+ years from now.
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I feel like AI has opened a door of plausibility to Black Mirror or Twilight Zone concepts more than any other novel technology in my lifetime. What if living 300 years meant the entire tempo of human living changes. That we all just slow right down because having control over our aging and when it happens. To be able to decide to extend your 20s… or not. To spend decades in your 30s. How would that change what’s important to us?
I’d be far more worried about this causing turbo cancer than immortality in dictators.
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It turns out that if you trigger all four Yamanaka factors—yeah, turbo cancer. But if you trigger only three of the four, you can trigger a reversion to the stem cell state without the increased cancer risk.
My goodness, what a show that was.-
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Co-produced by David Ellison and James Vanderbilt.
To expand, we might find out the hard way that having an expiration date was a feature of our species, not a flaw.
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All it would take would be one billionaire who invested in long term bonds, à la Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy…
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Walk me through it: in order to get dictators killed, because they defend themselves very effectively, we should put everybody on the planet under a biological death sentence, which will get the dictators too. No, I cannot endorse this.
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Science moves forward one death at a time So at least two systems run better with the implicit time limit.
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We should kill the dictators deliberately, improve our biology deliberately, and get stuffy old people like me to change their minds deliberately. No stupid use of death as a proxy, it's a horribly blunt instrument. "Let your ideas die in your place". Besides, maybe it's the young people who are the most dogmatic. Studies are inconclusive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle#Rebuttal If we're going to go around killing people for having rigid ideas, perhaps concentrate on the young ones, for statistical reasons.
Is there a reason why it can't possibly be stopped?
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Everything we have witnessed that arises also passes away. Every living thing, every dead thing - even stars and planets - arise and pass away. I feel it’s the ultimate hubris to think we can cheat death. Moreover, why would you want immortality? Many books of fiction and poetry discuss the curse of immortality. Here are a few: The Immortal, Jorge Luis Borges (1947) A man discovers a source of immortality, but eternity eventually destroys the significance of individual experiences. When everything can happen infinitely, nothing feels particularly important. The Mortal Immortal — Mary Shelley (1833) - also wrote Frankenstein A man drinks an elixir and lives for centuries without substantially aging. He watches his wife grow old and die, and becomes increasingly alienated from humanity. Shelley focuses on loneliness and the psychological weight of endless time. All Men Are Mortal — Simone de Beauvoir (1946) An immortal man lives through centuries of history, relationships, and political upheaval. Gradually he discovers that even extraordinary achievements seem meaningless when time is unlimited. The Makropulos Affair — Karel Čapek (1922) A woman lives more than 300 years through an elixir. She retains her youth but becomes emotionally exhausted, cynical, and incapable of finding pleasure. — There are more. Sure, these are fiction. But use your imagination. Why would you want immortality, even if you could retain perfect health indefinitely?
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Well if one can live to the heat death of the universe I'll count it as prevented, not postponed, death.
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Well, accidents. Inconveniently close supernovas. Something is likely to get you eventually, some few millennia later.
Wasn't death a requirement for us to reach this current stage of human evolution? I don't think it is a good idea to stop it entirely.
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Curing aging doesn't stop death entirely. There's still the attrition of living in the physical world. Some portion of the population will trip and break their necks every year.
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Not sure about death being required. It's more that life after reproductive success is not required.
Evolution of humans by natural selection is already over with - or at least proceeding at time scales irrelevant to our civilization.
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"Contrary to popular belief," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution I don't think it matters, mind you.
GPT-6 Astra Helped Me Jailbreak My Kindle (nirajrajgor.com)
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This is one reason why I think the AI revolution may not in the short term be a huge stock-market boom. By breaking down anti-competitive walls it could in the near term hurt incumbents (amazon, google, reddit, etc). How soon until we all have jailbroken our TV ads out of existence? What next, jailbreaking the adds off our netflix accounts? To be clear I think this is an excellent development for everyone, however evenly distributed good doesn't usually positively correlate with share price.
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You overestimate just how little pirating actually goes on relative to the entire populace
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Didn't I read this a year ago?
claude code helped me get access to the raw files from a scientific instrument we use in the lab all the time, but which won't give us raw data (only PDF reports). claude asked me for the .exe, which it promptly decompiled and reverse engineered the data format, and then helped me write my own analysis suite for the raw data. super cool.
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curious too
The write up says it used an existing jailbreak. It sounds like most of the work went into getting the slideshow to work, setting up a feedback loop so Astra could work out / blunder into a solution with the desired characteristics.
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Reading this causes embarassment from author's helplessness. > I first tried GPT-5.6 Sol with reasoning effort set to Extra High. It wrote code to connect to the Kindle but couldn't resolve an error that prevented it from storing data on the device. Then I tried Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5, but Anthropic's cybersecurity safeguards blocked each attempt after two prompts. Finally, I tried GPT-6 Astra with reasoning effort set to High. We were able to jailbreak the Kindle. "We were able to". It takes a modern AI human and 4 LLMs to do something that could be done by googling "kindle jailbreak" and following instructions - they have to be performed on Kindle anyway.
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I'm a seasoned embedded engineer and it took me hours to figure what the "right" jailbreak was and how it worked. In the end it was easy to accomplish but as usual the documentation is abysmal. I sometimes catch myself saying "we" when prompting AI so it really doesn't bother me to see this language being used. But I concede it can sound jarring or hubristic.
While everyone has been worried about it becoming too easy to hack into things, something I've been worried about for the last few years is it becoming too hard to hack into things. Right now, all of these things are being broken into to be jailbroken and such, but the companies building these hardware devices have access to the models too. It seems like a distinctly possible and sad world that they might get so much better at keeping their devices locked down by hardening them with the support of LLMs that future devices become an absolute bitch to jailbreak, even moreso than they were before.
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Well, before they do, can someone jailbreak various cars?I am too scared to brick mine.
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I think this is true, but on the flip side it could become common to buy "blank" hardware where the user provides their own OS or firmware. In the past it was just too burdensome to do this so we expected the hardware vendor to provide the software, but we could enter an era where providing the software is relatively easy. I think one area we are seeing this is the flood of hand held emulator gaming machines. Companies in China pump these things out and the community has provided numerous custom firmwares to the point a new one seems to come out every week. All vibe coded in Rust but who cares, if it plays the games and looks nice that's all you need.
Is it just entirely unprofitable to sell hardware devices unsubsidized without locking it all into restrictive ecosystems & services?
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Nintendo manages to squeak out a margin on hardware unlike the other big players. However, this is only because they trail behind in specs, and their devices are simply cheaper.
OTA updates?
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Mod chips may help there, or UART debugging. You can’t OTA update the PCB inside.
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Only until consumers get fed up with everything from their TV to their coffee maker spying on them and start demanding IOT products that don't actually connect to the Internet and instead interact with a local gateway device. That may never happen, but the barriers to making all your gadgets cooperate and speak the same protocol instead of requiring vendor-specific apps are definitely getting lower.
What you’re essentially saying is right now we have weak human written code that might have some vulnerabilities, but something written by a frontier LLM may not have those.
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More like companies can spend the money to have AI scan everything and pick off all the low hanging fruit. I work on a legacy codebase and these new AI tools are finding mountains of very stupid very serious security issues. After we finally get through them we will have a codebase that has no easily found exploits left.
come on man, it has significantly reduced value, but your comment assumes that if any two people input the same prompt (or sequence of prompts) they would get the same working answer, where its very much possible he had some sequence of guiding, and the thing he is sharing is a working product. which has more value than a prompt that may produce a working product some of the time...
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What I do when I finish a project using AI is ask the agent to write a prompt another agent could use to basically one-shot the same solution to the same problem, and that’s what I share. It works well and I don’t subject people to my agent’s walls of text. I’d even argue sharing today’s vibe coded solution has negative value - unless it’s a total throwaway thing, agents in 3 months will be able to code a much better solution to the problem.
Meanwhile Opus 5.5 didn't even answer my question about reading user memory in a linux die notifier, a question which had nothing to do with security, just low-level system programming.. Oh wait, the author said: > The attempts with Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 were both blocked by Anthropic's cybersecurity safeguards after two prompts. How unsurprising :)
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I don't know the "magic" which goes into prompts which allows them to continue, but I've been using Opus+Fable 5+ for reverse engineering games and adding mods to games which weren't meant to support them. For some reason, I've not run into the "safe guards" around hacking despite Anthropic models happily de-compiling and examining applications at my request.
RJ Mitte has died (news.sky.com)
He died by suicide. A reminder to everyone here: Even when you can’t see a way forward, one can still emerge. Stay. Reach out. You don’t have to face the darkest moments alone.
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Reach out? Towards what mysterious force is one to reach out to? Call 988, get sent to spend some time off of work while locked up with others in the same predicament? Get to spend 10 minutes once or twice a week with a shrink who will spend 8 of those minutes talking to themselves and then write a script for the least-efficacious (but non-habit-forming!) medications available? That's not help. In places with decent public funding for this stuff, the only way out this unhelpful environment is to gain enough false humility to be able to pretend to have something in common with those in the required daily group therapy sessions and work towards becoming an expert at telling agreeable lies. In places that don't have public funding for this stuff, it's perhaps even worse: The money will run out before the fake humility kicks in. Either way: They send you packing and nothing is fixed. Things are only worse. You're even more broke than you were before (and likely jobless by now as well), and rent isn't getting paid so the despair of seemingly-inevitable homelessness just moved a few steps closer. Whatever other problems you had are now also intensified. It's not help. It's kicking the can down the road. (Ah yes, downvotes. That's kit and parcel with the subject matter. See what happens when a person tries to reach out and talk about this stuff? They're actively shunned. It's absolutely fucking amazing.)
When I was making big bank, my accountant suggested I give him check writing ability to make it smoother for me to pay bills. He was later arrested for fraud. Amazing.
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Did you give him the ability?
Horrible. And she's still doing it to other actors and her identity is not disclosed.
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Why isn't she doing a 20 year sentence for this kind of fraud?
Sounds like he killed the wrong person.
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That seems true from our perspective. But from his, there may be a huge difference between committing murder, no matter how justified it may seem, and just leaving the world.
Janas: Run LLMs larger than RAM by streaming experts from SSD (github.com/prabanta-dev)
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Why are the models being used so old (in llm years anyway). Why no Qwen 3.8 ?
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Based on how vibe-coded this whole thing is, I’m guessing the newer models weren’t in the training data and the agent just picked what it knew existed.
would this work on a virtual disk, say w s3 or dropbox
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Sure, it’ll just be absurdly slow. Maybe next you can run an LLM off of some old MFM drives
If anyone needs to see what 62 tokens/second looks like: https://token.qusai.pro/?speed=62 Which seems sufficient for mortals who are not running gas town, but want a local model.
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Not sure if the measurement method used for this is actually valid or reliable enough, but for reference, Codex 6.1 Sol Standard runs at 19.9 tok/s according to a benchmark I recently saw: https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/s/b4mUszSOv1
60 toks/sec may be ok for pure chat or token generation, but not for token preprocessing nor any sort of agentic work.
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>.. nor any sort of agentic work. may I ask why? oai luna runs at 60-70 toks/s; astra runs around 35-45 , are you just worried that your agentic work can't spread across a lot of parallel work?
AI is a tool and using it well takes skill (yyhh.org)
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AI without guardrails is an instant complexity creep. The complexity quickly overpowers it and the purpose of the project it was asked to work on. After a very low threshold that complexity becomes unmanageable by humans. At that point you become dependent on AI. The job of professionals now is to contain the complexity to keep projects maintainable and manageable, because even Claude will runaway and outpace itself and not be able to catch up with itself on a larger project. Humans are fully capable of generating spaghetti code too, but nothing can outpace AI in doing it. If you give up thinking you lose control and ownership fast.
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Does Hickey not like AI? figures.
LLMs are a technology, not a product (or tool). In five years the underlying technology will look similar to what we have today, but the way we access it and the usage patterns and the interface (the product) will be completely different. If we are still interacting with LLMs through chat in five years I will be severely disappointed.
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>If we are still interacting with LLMs through chat in five years I will be severely disappointed. ideas? hard to envision otherwise. i mean the input will be natural language right? so type, speak, or neuralink it in... but it's going to receive the text you think of, right?
> Calling AI a collaborator isn't an attempt to anthropomorphize it. We can collaborate with a horse to travel Naive question: What, practically speaking, is the delta between anthropomorphization of AI, which it seems like you are trying to avoid (fairly so!), and the sort-of animistic stance you seem more comfortable to apply? I reckon that a lot of folks who might recoil at ascribing human qualities to LLMs would similarly feel discomfort comparing those models to a horse. While it's probably uncontroversial to say that horses are, coarsely speaking, "simpler" in many ways than humans, I suspect most people would agree that they are more complex than i.e., a "stochastic parrot". Is the difference related to motive, maybe? That humans can have hidden preferences, and their actions can in fact betray their intended ends? That no matter how closely we observe someone, we may not glean any meaningful insight into their true motives? And we feel some (justified) discomfort in conferring this quality to AI? I think non-human animals can exhibit this sort of behavior too (albeit to a lesser degree). To me, it feels like restricting oneself to analogizing AI to a non-human animal in order to keep some distance from ascribing it consciousness may be less effective to that end than desired. In place of your horse example, would it feel appropriate to liken AI to, say, a compiler peppered with bugs? Program - prompt - goes in, executable - agent actions - come out; mostly what we expect, but occasionally goes off the rails in ways we cannot understand. The caveat there, I suppose, is that we have not until now created a compiler which we cannot sensibly decompile. Fun to think about.
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Scary as well. You can control a tool, but not necessarily a sufficiently intelligent collaborator. If you approach AI as a collaborator, the challenge isn't to understand it and predict it, as OpenAI failed to do with their own product, but to motivate it correctly and and constrain it sufficiently to guarantee safety. You need guardrails for when you get the alignment wrong. How strong can guardrails be made though? The public has this sci-fi idea that AI can be constrained with simple, Asimov style laws. The problem is that LLM's don't think in the way humans do. They can produce results of dizzying complexity but hallucinate or fail to do basic arithmetic. You can't currently rely on AI to follow simple rules like "Don't access an outside network.". This is a problem that needs to be addressed urgently.
LLMs would be automation if they were deterministic. Since they are not, they are just sources of incorrect information that needs to be corrected by a human. Ask an author if they'd like a job as a fact checker or a spell checker. While those are both skills, they are not skills many people aspire to, and they are not of higher order value. While people deal with incorrect information all day long and mispelled words without it disrupting their life a computer cannot do that same. Pity for it.
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You can have 100% accuracy with non-determinism. The time is just variable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_algorithm This is not to say you can ALWAYS have 100% accuracy from something non-deterministic. I just saying non-determinism doesnt necessarily make something inaccurate.
I'm happy for you. Enjoy your spaghetti.
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As if the remote developers weren't writing spaghetti code or removing vital parts. At least the AI understands intention. A few years ago, one of the Indian developers removed the checkout button from an e-commerce site because I told him there was a specific issue at checkout and I described it in detail. His solution was not letting people check out for 1 whole day until we caught the issue after 300+ emails overnight. Even ChatGPT 3.5 is more logical. And this guy was a senior, certified Magento developer. Another Ukrainian developer inserted a card skimmer at the checkout, and we caught it in 2 days. This was also a certified developer. I can list the nightmare stories for days. I am just so happy not to be dealing with these people anymore; end of story. Don't get me wrong, we still pay for Local real developers, and if we catch them doing dodgy stuff, we hold them accountable. It is so rare compared to what we've dealt with overseas developers. I am so happy I don't pay these lying remote developers thousands of dollars anymore, and we can do it all with a much smaller, smarter local team.
Its probable that AI will roll out much faster than humans can develop that skill of using it in a way that increases not decreases human knowledge over time. The current slew of excellent LLMs will probably cause a decades long dip in human cognitive ability. If social media on smartphones had an impact of ability of students to concentrate, LLM AI will likely have a much greater negative impact on education. There are trillions of dollars of investment pushing for humans to trust whatever an LLM says, and very little money behind encouraging people to tackle hard problems themselves and train themselves to think. I have to say honestly, that AI looks like an apocalypse for human thinking [ Im glad Tao is warning people, I just dont think many people will listen ]
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I’m constantly learning from LLMs. Claude Opus is like a Wikipedia I can talk to while I am riding my bike. I can learn all about optics, point spread function and FWHM, and more. My mechanical engineer coworkers are using the tools to learn how our software system works. Sure you don’t need to learn coding syntax anymore. I mean some knowledge is helpful but the machine can explain it. I never learned assembly language - compilers were doing a great job with that by the time I started. Not to say it isn’t useful, but I learned a lot about higher level concepts instead.
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That's not the point. The point is that that isn't how young people and college students are using it now: they are using it to think for them, and that's what's going to lead to the dip in human cognitive ability that we can already see signs of. You're an outlier in using it responsibly.
I've learnt more since the advent of LLMs than I did in the 10 years prior. And it's not just me; that is most people's experience with LLMs. But most of those people would also concur with your apocalyptic thinking. AI is the apocalypse for thinking, except for me , only I am smart enough and experienced enough to maintain my cognitive ability while using LLMs.
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You just feel like you have learned those things. Without the LLM all of the “skills” are lost.
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I feel like language models help me search through concepts really quickly, and will also help me understand things just well enough to use those concepts more quickly. So they kind of narrow what I learn down to exactly what I need in the moment. I don't think I'm actually learning more though. I think the act of banging my head against the wall to learn something the hard way teaches me more, but feels harder and is slower. But then I really retain it, and I've also learned a bunch of meta-skill in the process. So I think it's just different. Now it's harder to force myself to bang my head against the wall when the easier path is so accessible. Used to just have far fewer available paths because they were too hard.
Nobody says it does. However, if I am solving big business problems and making enough to justify a private cook, why wouldn't I do that to optimize and focus on my area of expertise? I don't want to be a code monkey. I want to talk to business people and come up with solutions. I don't care if LLM writes most of it or a junior dev...well I do LLM is better.
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Seems like the LLM has already impacted your reading comprehension. We're talking about learning here, not the overall value of LLMs.
Can we explore the digging holes analogy a bit more? Digging by hand with a shovel involves 1. Assessing the terrain and checking any documented or obvious obstacles (subsurface water, gas, electricity etc) 2. Planning the approach to digging the hole, most efficient angle, and ensuring that collapse doesn't occur 3. Organising disposal 4. Digging the hole 5. Dealing with any unforeseen issues (old tree roots, old foundations etc) This is exactly the same whether digging by hand or using an excavator. The excavator isn't automating stages 1, 2, 3, or 5. It's just speeding up the 4th stage and only if there aren't stage 5 issues present. LLMs when employed in a manner on the extreme end of the vibe coding spectrum are automating every stage of the process. If the excavator was hooked up to an LLM and left to run all stages of digging (extreme vibe digging?), I'd argue that yes, the operator is becoming lazy, and is running a very dangerous operation.
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> LLMs when employed in a manner on the extreme end of the vibe coding spectrum are automating every stage of the process And when you have a backhoe, you can skip a lot of those things, too. It's bad, sure.. but so is skipping a lot of the important parts when using AI.
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I think most people try the "extreme end" of vibe coding -- "Claude, write me an app to do X" once or twice and realize that doesn't really work -- to get it to work reliably you basically have to write a ROADMAP.md that details each step in a fair amount of detail -- pretty much the same work you'd have to do to hand a project off to a human intern.
Intel D270 GPU AI Accelerator–Up to 480 GB LPDDR5X (intel.com)
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Yay more vaporware hardware I get to read about and never see or have a chance to buy.
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Ai generated no doubt
Can I actually buy this? Should I prefer it over Blackwell?
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You can tell by the shape of the board that it's meant to go into a server chassis behind a stack of 80mm blower fans. It's not meant for consumers, but you will be able to buy it used for $200 off ebay in 7 years to put in your home lab.
Codex CLI installs a persistent, self-updating background daemon by default (github.com/openai)
There aren't any documented settings to disable this, but there is a feature flag it currently sits behind. You can flip it in your ~/.codex/config.toml[1]: [features] daemon_auto_start = false There are also some files that it writes to in ~/.codex at startup: pid files, lock files, things like that. You can delete them and replace them with symlinks to /dev/null, then mark those unwritable with `chattr +i` or similar. Presumably then the background daemon will crash on startup, if the feature flag ever goes away. -- 1: https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/0c329ad2c9d5a2592128a1d536c66e16f9397e46/codex-rs/core/config.schema.json#L869
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Hope they don't remove this flag
I’m not deeply pro-codex, but it does have all those features. Who knows since when.
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It did not as of a week or so back. https://x.com/dvsj_in/status/2098620473550700771
I don't think that's always true. Although I just looked into it, and even Ubuntu 26.04 appear to default to tmpfs for /tmp storage, so I guess it's fairly universal now. Not sure if I agree with that idea in principle... What's wrong with just wiping it intermittently??
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It’s RAM unless you have swap enabled.
Installed "clor.com" and it got into a loop of downloading its docker image from ghcr them throwing it away immediately because it was supposedly out of date (iirc). 65mbps continuous transfers for a week until I looked at my network traffic and saw 500gb of rx per day.
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Sisyphus' updater
Found this one: https://usehax.dev/ Anyone experiences with it?
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Yeah, using it a bunch with local LLMs. It's fast (small system prompt), focused on the basics, made around simple choices, and possibility to call it in scripts. So far I have very positive experiences, the results are generally better (and not just faster) than in other harnesses with the same models. I've done the same (user) prompts for tasks in a range of them, and compare the outcome to eval between them. Simple (harness) beats complicated one many times. I do wish it could use MCP though, but not as often as I think, and CLI tool usage often compensates on this front with little extra effort) That is now my usuall go-to harness for things usually. Still figuring out the edges though (when we get off the happy path, like models reaching their max context, or such...) It's very light, recommed you try it out, and see if it fits your toolbox.
(author passing by) Could you please report the issues you've experienced on the repo? I did quite a bit of testing myself on local models (Qwen, Ornith, Gemma, Muse Glimmer) with llama.cpp, and they all worked fine. Details would be helpful. Also one brief note for Codex users specifically. hax can work out-of-the-box as codex-cli drop-in replacement (since it can use the already authenticated codex token), so it's super easy to try it - basically it will be a zero-config experience.
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Thanks for making it :)
'AI' Is Not a Tool by Rich Hickey (linkedin.com)
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> You don't direct the action of an LLM - you make requests and it acts on its own, without your energy or continuous direction. This request/automation cycle is not wielding, it's not control, it's not continuous, it's without feedback. There are certainly many ways of using coding agents, but the way he describes it is not my approach. There's a huge amount of direction and feedback. I don't know if I'd call it a tool so much as a modality of building software. Within the modality, you have everything from truly unsupervised YOLO coding to something far more structured. To an extent, it's similar to how you go about setting up standard operating procedures to get teams of humans to do work at scale.
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wish we could go like a week with no posts about ai. we all deserve a break to learn something new...
Is a table saw a tool? It's not deterministic. Every cut is going to be slightly different. It can go "rogue" and toss the work piece back at you. It can even kill you or cut your fingers off. Virtually nothing in woodworking is deterministic because wood is not deterministic. Every piece of wood is different. Now that I've nitpicked and feel better ;) ... I'm not quite sure why this matters. LLMs are definitely not you writing code using a tool. An IDE is more like that. They write the code. Is that even a debate? That doesn't mean the human can't be in that loop, the human can review the code, change the code, change the instructions. I can ask an LLM to mill me a cube on a CNC. Or a more complex object. It's not the same as me doing it on a mill. But I can still control the end result to the extent that I care to control it. I'm not going to learn how to mill a cube by having an LLM make me a cube. I'm not going to become a better machinist by asking an LLM to make me a cube. I can also send my G-code to a vendor and have them make me a cube. Or hire a person and give him a rough idea of what I want and have them make it.
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Something something tolerances
Heres another view. A tool is something you buy or use to accomplish a task. Its a commodity everyone buys a hammer to bang in those nails. AI is the same here, everybody thinks they are developing a new calendar app, they are actually developing the SAME calendar app. The person didnt actually develop anything they simply used the tool to accomplish the same goal. The creativity and skill of the craftsman is gone. Craftsman/woman create new and unique or different things because they understand the problems or goals and create. THe people using AI mostly dont know the basics of software and tahts part of the problem why we see really dumb mistakes, like little or no security.
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Most code before LLMs was human slop, not the carefully crafted artisanal blocks of fine braces you claim. AI today produces better slop than most devs ever did. And LLMs are getting better - humans were never on an upward general trajectory.
I can’t think of someone more worthy of the collective attention of HN than Rich Hickey.
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So I'm supposed to respect someone who did something cool that one time, but who now proudly parades his own ignorance?
Okay but how is it used in society? I don’t know many people who refer to Websters. Notice your Webster’s doesn’t include the insult usage. I see your Websters and raise you Urban Dictionary: > That guy who makes us shake our head in disbelief but at the same time makes us feel better about ourselves since we are not him. Please consider social and modern day usage as well when discussing English words. Also 1913? Wow.
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Often it is used in society and media in the exact way as the definition I provided. For a good recent example, the following: "I think that we learned through the thousands of pages that I've released to the public that Jack Smith was a tool of the Biden administration to put Trump in prison." - Chuck Grassley Grassley isn't calling out Jack Smith as per urban dictionary usage, here, right? If we were breaking down what was meant here one could, if they were using slightly more interesting language than Grassley, say that Joe Biden is a man of intrigue and that Jack Smith was an agent being used to accomplish his political purposes. Unsurprisingly, Grassley is on the other side of the political fence and was using the word tool here reproachfully. Fundamentally the definition I linked is the definition under which people are suggesting that other people can simultaneously retain agency, be considered a tool of another, and not be insulted by that circumstance. But yes: Webster's 1913. Modern dictionaries elide nuance in communication in favour of terse & technical language, and while there are additional uses of the word in modern times, that doesn't erase the history of the word - especially in the usages that still exist with an uninterrupted lineage to the modern day. Today's Merriam-Webster has an inelegant matching definition for tool , "one who is used or manipulated by another", and while that certainly matches Grassley's usage, and to say "Jack Smith was used by Joe Biden to try to imprison Trump" is certainly correct, there is something missing from this definition that the 1913 encapsulates.
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