Unlurker|Replay|About
Andrej Karpathy breaks down the capability gap (twitter.com)
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>Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while. Amid all the discussion of sigmoid curves, and where the "LLM wall" will materialise, I think few people would have predicted that the real wall in LLMs would end up being humans' capacity to verify the output. What I fear is that people simply eschew human review altogether, considering we're talking about the industry that came up with the "move fast and break things" credo. Human review of LLM-produced code where I work is already a farce, and we're not special enough to be one of Karpathy's 5,000. I do my best to manually review anything that's my responsibility, but I'm literally one of very few people left working on my team, so in practice what happens is I submit PRs that are at best glossed over by completely unrelated teams for security, malware/prompt injection, and other serious concerns. Quality insofar as vetting others' code has completely gone out the window and it shows in the number of bug reports that come back, often themselves written in Claudease. Worse yet all the incentives point to this being the most economically viable thing individual companies can do. I think it goes without saying some type of regulation here is urgently needed, and that an unexpected cause of an AI bubble pop may end up being that humans simply aren't able to keep up with the pace of the output - leading either to precautionary plateauing of capability, or major liability risks related to a decline in quality.
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If the software coming out of OpenAI and Anthropic is what we have to judge, I wonder about the 5000 ... Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the models are some multiplicative factor better on the inside. Doesn't that mean the demos should work?
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Most people see a clumsy chatbot, most professionals see modest gains, and a tiny group is watching the curve go vertical, all at once. The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.
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I use models all day everyday, have unlimited access to all models. The curve is not going "verticle". I have all the workflows and meta agentic tooling, im not holding it wrong. Its bad, not everything is a 20th percentile problem. There is in fact no indication of this, not evem the precious benchmaxxed benchmarks ya'll love to reference. There is however a exponential curve of slop, and an ever increasing number of peoples who's minds are completely captured by these things.
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This is a bad take on an unserious platform.
Cartographers of North Korea (cartographers-nk.wonyoung.so)
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I wonder how things have evolved in the last decade as North Korea has tried to evolve quickly at least in Pyongyang and more people inside the country have access to tech than ever before.
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Opened the link just because I've always been mystified by how detailed that region is, and it ended up being a fascinating read. One more reason why OSM is one of my personal 7 Wonders of the Internet.
Really good analysis and storytelling. I wonder what the distribution looks like for joke/troll contributions on OSM and what nations or places get vandalized the most?
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Contributor of ~10 years and I have yet to be the first person to notice vandalism, as in, that it's not already been/being tackled. I've been the first to notice various mistakes (big and small), or seen the impact when large parts of the map were messed up in some big attack, and there was one case where I wasn't sure if the person had intentionally broken something or if it was some weird misunderstanding, but they never came back so... not much action to take there. Now, I'm also just a regular contributor and not someone who looks for vandalism specifically; but from my point of view, the distribution of joke/troll contributions to real ones is close to zero (c.q. infinity). Dunno why, I guess most people simply mean well?
Artificial Insanity (richwhitehouse.com)
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> This was crudely written in under 2 hours without the assistance, analysis, or hardening of an LLM, and with no editorial treatment whatsoever. I think this is how everyone should be writing in an age of shitty, sterilized parrot regurgitation. Now, let us enjoy the end, however it may come. <3
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People have been making this stochastic parrot argument for almost 5 years now and it's less and less accurate each year. Everyone who rejected the stochastic parrot argument has been right about AI progress and the increasing abilities of LLM's in math, coding, writing, etc. You would be laughed at in 2020 for claiming an LLM could write coherently or could possibly pass the Turing test. Those who claim that AI aren't capable of "genuine judgement" or whatever rhetorical flourish they feel is most effective at dismissing AI capabilities would tell you in 2022 that AI would never be capable of coding, or in 2023 it would never be capable of mathematics beyond grade-school level. Those same people now will claim that AI could never come up with a genuine breakthrough in math, science, etc. Detractors of AI have a full time job of moving goalposts. That being said, AI, once sufficiently powerful, will grant whoever controls it the ability to mold the world as they see fit, for better or worse. They will have access to superhuman mathematicians, coders, strategists, PR, financial engineering, legal skill, etc. Essentially an army of superhuman intellects which can afford them guaranteed success in any domain they wish to pursue. Anyone who doesn't see this as potentially the most destabilizing event in human history likely isn't thinking deeply enough about it, or is still knee deep in denial.
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> You would be laughed at in 2020 for claiming an LLM could write coherently or could possibly pass the Turing test. My dude, an LLM still can't write coherently.
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Do you really believe that, or is that just an ego-preserving reflexive response? LLM's have been capable of near human-level writing for over a year now. https://vulsar.ai/benchmarks/creative-writing-v1/
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There seems to be two common fallacies in SV technocrats' AI discourse: (1) A far-reaching tendency to overextrapolate from the low-hanging fruit of the last few years of pretraining progress. GPT-2 to GPT-3 may have been a quantum leap, but GPT-3 to GPT-4 was not, and GPT-4 to 5 even less so. The party has been kept going by RL and agents, but still, there is indeed a point of diminishing returns, not just relative to available compute but to how much training is possible when the entire intellectual output of humanity, plus a raft of synthetic data, has already been inhaled by the training process. If one is to internalise the things that are said here on HN with regularity about model progress, and sentences ending with "yet" or "for now", then it would be easy to conclude that my 10 year-old son, who gained 3 inches of height last year, will be tallest structure on the planet by age 17. (2) Inability to distinguish between technological, computational, and energetic limits of LLM capabilities vs. ontological / conceptual ones. There are some things LLMs cannot do, or at least do well, at any size, at infinite size and with infinite compute, simply due to the very nature of what LLMs are to begin with. This latter topic receives almost no attention, except maybe from Gary Marcus and Yann LeCun. In that respect, this article is a breath of fresh air, insofar as it highlights that LLMs aren't "AI" at all, as we have traditionally understood the concept. They really _are_ stochastic parrots. The relevant questions are about how much that matters for some domain or set of applications, not whether they are an emerging alien intelligence with civilisation-threatening capabilities.
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> There are some things LLMs cannot do, or at least do well, at any size, at infinite size and with infinite compute, simply due to the very nature of what LLMs are to begin with. How can we be so confident that there is anything LLMs fundamentally cannot do? Proving that impossibility seems hard. Drawing trend lines far into the future is foolish, but the recent trend is clear and its not obvious how much more progress is needed before they start having a meaningful impact on more aspects of life. > not whether they are an emerging alien intelligence with civilisation-threatening capabilities. The people building them are explicitly attempting to do this. They may not succeed, but what if they do? Seems worth considering that scenario.
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LLM utility is exponential with increased LLM capability. Even if improvements to LLMs slow down their impact will continue to increase. And there is no evidence LLMs are slowing down. In fact improvements still seem to be accelerating.
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> However, this parrot can't hope to emulate any serious form of consciousness, and therefore can't ever be capable of intelligent judgment I often hear this asserted, but never with any actual justification. Why can it not?
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It has been generally agreed since at least Plato that it’s up to people making a positive assertion to present evidence, not up to skeptics to prove it’s not possible. N.B. Russell’s Teapot Analogy. You have to prove it is/can be conscious, not the other way around.
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I am going to say it with only a trace of mild bemusement in no specific order: - careers, nay, nearly whole industries may ride on that being the case - classifying it as conscious intelligence opens a range of ethical questions no thinking, conscious, intelligent ( and likely non-evil ) life-form would want to comprehend - being able to ascribe judgment to it without intelligence undermines a lot of what we do on a daily basis and puts into question what it is that makes us human - I am saying this part in the nicest possible way: hardcore cope if biblical proportions, where seemingly conscious, intelligent individual, who makes an argument for lack of consciousness manages to ( in the same sentence! ) to anthropomorphize the parrot and imbue it with hope - average human tendency to fear the unknown
Okay, but as I just put it in another thread (which was in "new" and never made it anywhere near the front page): All we have to do is assume that things progress in a linear way. Do you remember GPT-2? It was a bizarre curiosity, but was nevertheless considered a huge advance in late 2019. Practically useless, but interesting. It grew, and three and a half years later we got GPT-4, which was exceptionally capable on release. It grew still further, and three and a half years hence we now have GPT-6. This is already more intelligent, more imaginative, more disciplined, and far more erudite than the vast majority of individual humans. If you have an intellectual skill -- if you are, say, a mathematician or a chemist -- GPT-6 also has that skill and is functionally your peer. And then it has many other skills that you lack; if nothing else, it is superhuman in breadth. Assume a steady rate of progress. In three and a half years, we're going to have something that is genuinely a general superintelligence, and we're probably going to see recursive self-improvement begin to kick in (though subject to physical constraints on compute, etc.) Now is the time for an RSI start-up, I guess! Anyway, all you have to do is assume that things don't plateau. They have not plateaued to date; if anything, progress appears to be accelerating, and people are starting to panic that there are no brakes on this thing.
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"It's better than you, and if it isn't, it's bigger than you."
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<< people are starting to panic that there are no brakes on this thing. There are.. physical limits, as it were, which effectively restrict upper limit, but I hear what you are saying. A lot of the problems thrown at it and issues found in the process only seem to have helped. I feels ages ago when we were arguing 'it is merely a stochastic parrot'.
When Timnit Gebru described LLMs as "stochastic parrots", she was making a deep point about what she believed to be the limitations of the technology. Her argument claimed that while we perceived legible text coming from ChatGPT, we were actually being fooled by our innate pattern-matching instincts. Notably, at the time she wrote this, it wasn't uncommon to see LLMs collapse into piles of gibberish, lending credence the the idea that there was never any actual meaning in the output other than what we readers brought to it. It's safe to say that argument has collapsed utterly. Modern LLMs virtually never collapse into endless babbling loops. Far more importantly, they solve objectively hard problems. An LLM didn't merely inspire a mathematician to spot a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture that had been in front of his nose the whole time; it found the counterexample . These things are unquestionably generating meaningful outputs. (That obviously doesn't mean that you can simply trust LLM outputs!) At this point, trying to dunk on frontier models by calling them "stochastic parrots" is saying more about you than about the models. Moreover, it suggests you're not only out on a limb about the capabilities of LLMs, but also on what even the skeptic literature about it was saying. You should know what "stochastic parrot" actually meant; you shouldn't be using the term just because you think it sounds snazzy.
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Well, that may be what it was coined to mean, what does it mean now? Stochastic = statistical, parrot = using training data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot "a metaphor that frames large language models as systems that statistically mimic text without real understanding". I suppose you're defending them as having understanding. It's not "safe to say that argument has collapsed utterly", you're part of a campaign to reject the meme. On the other side, the meme is popular as a way to be rude about AI, because it's a cutting insult.
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> It's safe to say that argument has collapsed utterly. Modern LLMs virtually never collapse into endless babbling loops. Far more importantly, they solve objectively hard problems. And yet, they still output gibberish. They also still fail to solve objectively easy problems on a regular basis. That is because they are, indeed, still stochastic parrots without any actual understanding of anything or ability to reason about stuff. The argument hasn't collapsed at all.
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I really wish the article in question hadn’t used that phrase, because you’re right. But the rest of the article is also correct in the dangers facing us from this technology as an accelerant regardless , and I think it’s much more interesting to talk about that: but this entire comment thread will dunk on the stochastic parrot paragraphs instead. The funny thing is though, I think it’s an in group signalling mechanism. You need the anti-AI crowd to know that you’re anti-AI, and this is a rapid way of doing so, to get it upvoted here.
> This brings us to a big underlying problem with the way AI is being sold to us: it's being exaggerated to sound like way more than it is, and it's being sold to people/governments as something that will be capable of exceeding human "intelligence" in the near future when it's not capable of intelligence at all. How can you possibly hold this belief after Tuesday? An LLM solved a significant number of major open problems in many subfields of mathematics, including a major breakthrough on the Riemann Hypothesis. Get your head out of the sand.
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I suspect people are afraid of change and hide behind truths like “it’s not conscious”. It’s not. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a force to be reckoned with.
Do You Have Pre-2012 Onion Issues? (theonion.com)
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libraries sadly have to destroy old archives all the time but it's not like a lost Doctor Who episode, it will show up eventually meanwhile they can keep eerily predicting dystopia like the government televising executions for entertainment a year before it happens
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I was excited that I may have been able to help, but I just have issues from volumes 36 and 37... Perhaps this is for the best, as it would have deeply fed my pack rat tendencies.
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Should have posted the direct link with more details about what they are looking for and how to help. That's here: https://theonion.com/archivehunt/
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Updated, thanks!
Did somebody steal these magazines or are they just being overly dramatic?
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Hard to tell if the onion is trying to be funny?
I know everything they write is potentially a joke but I got curious when The Onion was founded; apparently it was in 1988, 38 years ago :)
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It sounds like their archive contains 270 year old contents, not that they’re 270 year old company
Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers (nanolathe.gg)
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Not sure about this one, but there is another engine that started as a Total Annihilation clone: https://recoilengine.org/ Some of the (open source) games on that engine ( https://beyondallreason.info/ and https://zero-k.info/ ) have similar feeling with the original TA, with quite different play styles. I do prefer Zero-K over Beyond All Reason, but I would recommend anyone interested in the genre to try both and decide for themselves.
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Cool, but also, BAR is better mechanically, and content wise though
Top down can be isometric. Isometric means “same measurements.” It refers to how the viewport is not like a camera above 3D terrain. Instead, you see each point below as though directly above. In other words, you can only ever see the top of an object regardless of whether it is centered or on the edge. If it wasn’t isometric, you would see more of the sides of objects that are near the edges.
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I've always assumed that isometric as used in describing videogames refers to the isometric projection, which is a very specific angle - or at least games that look approximately isometric. Age Of Empires, SimCity 2000, Constructor etc. Some of them were actually Dimetric or something else, but I'd never have referred to, say, SimCity 1 as an isometric game. Are you possibly thinking of "orthographic"?
I really despise these AI generated websites, they often look so samey. IDK about the numbering, but the overuse of cards everywhere, and abusing my favorite color schemes (tokyo-night, dracula style), really irritates me (esp, the color schemes, way to ruin even colors, guys). It makes me dislike whatever they're trying to "sell" (literally or metaphorically). I wish people who wanted to be "creative" would you know... be creative, not just "push button, machine go brrr" which is what half this stuff spits out. Template, generic, no individuality. Hyper "professional" looking (but just "cool" enough to not be completely corporate). On the other hand some of these look better and are more responsive than older sites that were definitely fuglier, klunky and less responsive. It feels like there's a middle ground, which I think is where good designer comes into play.
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I don't think that's unique to AI --- many sites always had the same bland style, especially corporate ones, and I remember all the complaints about bootstrap.css when that was the trend many years ago.
I was wondering what this "clean-room" jargon actually meant, after looking at the Adobe ripoffs being vibe coded by ArtCraft. As with most forms of theft and laundering, it's not really that clever. >> This document records behavior established from static analysis of the retail TotalA.exe. It is a clean-room behavioral contract, not a source translation. It deliberately omits executable addresses, data-image offsets, and raw decompiler names. The phrases established, supported inference, and unknown distinguish what the analysis proves from what remains a useful but unverified interpretation. The evidence is the executable's own control and data flow, its PE import table, and its embedded string vocabulary. Nothing here is taken from another engine, a capture, or a reimplementation. Step 1: Ask an LLM to decompile a binary, wash it into a "clean" description of the binary in its own format (a bunch of .MD files, one might suppose) and then build a new binary from that description. Step 2: Nothing. Is this really going to hold up in court?
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imo the better question is whether it will actually get to court, and the precedent on that is mostly no. so it doesn't really matter i think
Spiritual successor already exists: https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/Beyond-All-Reason
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Sort of. Back in the day I could play TA on my Mac.
I can get past the AI slop design myself, but the writing style is absolutely grating, especially the short repetitive phrases. "Punchy phrase. No X." "An open engine. Room to make it your own. "Same scene. Same instant. The same explosion. A different atmosphere." "A few things to know. The short answers." Why is it always the same? What awful post-training, or synthetic data training pipeline, or RLHF gone wrong, produced this homogenised, low variety slop style? And it's totally possible for LLMs to write actually decent or at least varied prose and I would think Anthropic (or OpenAI) has the resources to fix the issue, they just choose not to. Marketing copy wasn't this homogenous prior to LLMs, unless my memory fails me.
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Marketing copy wasn't this homogenous prior to LLMs, unless my memory fails me. It was, or at least the most popular sites used it. LLMs just amplified it.
I recently discovered Beyond All Reason, a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation. There have been several of these, but I think BAR is by far the best. It's open source, but looks nice and is polished. It has amazing quality-of-life features I haven't seen in any other RTS. And it supports insanely huge battles with hundreds of players and tens of thousands of units. 150-player match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQJujiZ-oz0 https://www.beyondallreason.info/
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It's better in just about every way, and if you have a copy of TA (such as from GOG), you can load the soundtrack from TA into BAR's music folder and it'll change the soundtrack to the TA soundtrack.
NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect (nyc.gov)
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What? A city can have jurisdiction over these things?
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This is a very bad thing and very, very scary. Very anti-capitalist. My KPIs that go into my annual review are going to be thrashed, and without the raise I was expecting, I am unlikely to be able to continue to afford my second family. This is literally going to take food out of their mouths. I do not deserve this.
> This will have no impact on Adobe's shenanigans. Which is where AI comes in. Companies that are user-hostile have no place in the future. edit: love the downvotes for pro-user rights advocacy. Keep it real, HN.
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> Companies that are user-hostile have no place in the future. All I can think of reading this is that bit from Futurama when Bender goes: AHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHA. Oh wait you're serious. Let me laugh even harder. Yeah we've had near four decades of massive expansion of software, free and not, and AI is definitely what's going to finally make it so companies can't be user hostile. That was what we were missing. 100%.
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I feel real dumb asking this but how will AI help here? I'm sick, so if this is a stupid question, let's say it's because of that.
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Another way it would help is making it easier for users to analyse the T&Cs they are signing up for. Most people aren't well versed in reading T&Cs and whilst LLMs won't do a perfect job, they would likely do a decent job at assessing and highlighting potentially unfriendly clauses such as this.
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AI makes it easy to replicate existing software. One can ask a LLM to replicate Photoshop functionalities and, to some extent, it will.
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"to some extent" is the keyword here. There is a lot of fine tuning in Photoshop that's very hard to replicate.
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Anyone successfully done that recently?
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49983780
I hate to defend Adobe but it literally says "Annually, paid monthly" right under the price. They should for sure list the annual price and the monthly price but it's not "burried".
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[delayed]
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Seems intentionally manipulative.
Wait, so you'll pay the $60, and then, will you lose access?
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Any time I've had a similar subscription, you retain access for the full period. The messaging has usually been something like: "Annual subscription cancelled at the end of current period. Access ends on 12/31/2026" (even if today is 6/1/2026) That's why the "cancellation fee" comment is weird to me - there's no need to message that way, since "pay the rest of the committed period" seems to be a common (and at least to me, very understandable) way to handle this. Even with monthly services, I don't think I've ever had an immediate loss of access - it's there until the end of the billing cycle. As it should be, IMO. The only exception would be if I force-deleted my account as well as that's a very explicit "I'm done-done" signal to the service provider.
It’s incredible how much virtue signaling this is. He has no power to enforce it - I’d just ignore him anyway, nothing he can do about it.
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Fines to the non-compliant businesses and forcing them to refund are two major ways he will enforce this.
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did it make you _feel good_ though?
Yes tabled means the opposite on either side of the Atlantic. Has caused me a lot of confusion over the years. Personally as a Brit I just can’t see the logic in the US meaning
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As an American, I can't see the logic in having the relationship between a proposal (which is an idea that may be embodied in documentation) and a table (which is a thing that we rest our beer upon) as having any importance at all -- regardless of which way it goes. It seems like plain speech could be used, but this profoundly-irrational jargon was selected instead.
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I think in the UK sense 'tabled' is borne out of a pretty literal meaning - based on the proposal literally being brought to the table where the committee are meeting to assess (and potentially vote) on its viability.
Damn this looks too good to be real, where's the provision to make any kind of encryption illegal ?
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It looks good reading it like this but I am always scared about the unintended effects. Like the ... cookie banners. Dynamic pricing absolutely has to go this is so unethical
Probably this bit: > “Dark patterns” (also called deceptive or manipulative design) are interface choices that steer users towards decisions they would not otherwise make, for example: > Making the “accept all” option bright and prominent, but hiding “reject” or “manage settings” Not a direct reference, but it's clear exactly what it's getting at. Wouldn't call it a big win though. If it's not established as a browser level setting instead of some shitty per-website banner that expires every 3 weeks as the site adjusts its ad serving system once again? We're still in cookie law hell.
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> Making the “accept all” option bright and prominent, but hiding “reject” or “manage settings” Isn't this already illegal? By law the websites are required to make full opt out single click. They just don't care.
It's not clear why enforcement would be needed necessarily. Assuming that you pay with a credit card, I would assume you could dispute the charge on the basis that they're violating the law and win any faceoff immediately on that basis.
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Surely we agree that paying with cash or a debit card should entitle you to equal treatment under the city's rules and laws.
To avoid the overhead, we could simply adopt pro-consumer practices across the board? Easier than segmenting users and deciding which cancellation mechanisms are available to them based on region.
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Pro-consumer practices are not inherently compliant practices
How to Build Wealth as a Career Person (asheradeniyi.com)
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God I'm so tired of this. How about instead we use our democracy to create laws that let people live their lives in dignity with no worry of having a roof over their head and food to eat without having to spend every waking moment hyper-optimizing their entire existence.
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You don't need stock based comps, insane salaries and selling your soul to your employer to build wealth. You just need to live within your means and invest your money.
I'm a "career person" and expect to retire soon in my late forties. The blog's advice is generally on point, but IMHO places too much emphasis on busting ass to play the career game. There are easier ways to win, and here's my secret sauce: * Get a job at a successful listed tech company (not a startup) that issues RSUs. * Get promoted to senior level but no higher (too much responsibility, poor work life balance, exposure to office politics) * Move to a low tax jurisdiction like Dubai, Hong Kong or Singapore, at least long enough to build a serious nest egg (several million). * Live significantly below your means: I aimed to save & invest half my income. You'll still live a good life because these countries have vast income inequality and services are cheap. * Find a partner who shares your values. Not saying this is easy or even possible for many, but it worked for me.
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The important parts are to find good management that will help you grow early in your career and will ensure you are well compensated. Prioritize hitting investment amounts that really allows for wealth growth (a few hundred thousand). I think startup or smaller growth companies are better for this (but I'm biased since that was my path), as you can get more responsibility and rise through the ranks quickly to that critical senior or staff level where you start getting the real RSUs even if it means moving to a different company.
If you're poor or otherwise lack good health insurance it's very likely you will endure negative health consequences as a result. If you don't have money it's very likely that you'll have a poor diet and have negative health consequences, be dumber, be able to do less, and just generally have a life filled with more suffering.
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Sure but there’s a wide band between not having money and having generational wealth.
4% of 5m is 200k; not a high level FAANG TC
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200k is very high L4 at Google, medium L5, not out of the question for L6, and 300k is definitely L6 level (2% or so are your odds of getting there) Also different tax rates for investment vs income: 200k taxed at 30% is easily L6 level compensation. And if you're comparing to L6 anywhere outside of US it's easily L7.
It's about individual tolerance for risk and ability to sleep at night knowing that the bank still holds the title to your house.
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What is the issue with the bank holding the title? Sure, you lose the house if you can't make the payments to the bank, but you also lose the house if you can't make the tax payments to the government. In both situations (with or without a mortgage), you never truly own it.
I'm sorry, but you still have to think (itsallaboutthebit.com)
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> If you want a reliable system you should know when to fail I think the main problem is that most people pushing for heavy AI delegation either 1. Don’t really care about system reliability or 2. Don’t understand the difference between code and system, and assume that a system must be reliable if some automated checks pass
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Most of this article went over my head, but I think this is key point: if your prompt is not specific enough, many decisions are a coin flip. If you are using AI, you still have to know what you want it to do. If you are a project manager and give your team incomplete requirements, the result may not be unlike this.
All of this "you need to understand the code" discussion reminds me of when I was an undergrad. I worked in a computer with someone a fair bit older -- they had even worked with punchcard systems. He was always happy to oblige us with war stories from the olden times & we would lap them up. He favorite axe to grind was how my generation put too much trust into the compiler. "Just because it compiles doesn't mean you're done. You need to look at the actual assembly. Compilers can be VERY inefficient." This was in the 90s. There was some merit to his claim. But today? How many people who write Javascript look at the actual assembly code that is run? Not many. I can't help but wonder if this current "you need to understand the code" is the same thing all over again. And if in a few years, almost nobody will look at the generated Python, Ruby, etc.
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> But today? How many people who write Javascript look at the actual assembly code that is run? Not many. They don't look but they should.
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A compiler is far more deterministic than any LLM. I am skeptical that the two situations are really comparable.
I think he said the agents couldn’t make features in their existing codebases as well as in new ones, so he needed devs to still work on Basecamp. Maybe that has changed.
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That would be very odd. Agents work better in codebases with established conventions
All that requires _effort_. A stunt where you AI-translate a library into multiple languages is clearly not a context where you'll see that kind of effort applied.
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Yeah, someone should just do an Elixir port that blows his out of the water if they really want to prove the point, with benchmark numbers.
Make it clear that workslop is produced by the human committer and not the Claude. The human has a reputation and this is hurting that reputation. You can do this in a professional way but still get the point across that they're stealing productivity from others that have to pull up their slack. If the commits are too big or too dense. Make them break it up, clean up the comments etc. Otherwise they are simply doing a poor job. Not Claude, them .
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> Not Claude, them. Can’t have the cake and eat it too. If they “solve” navier stokes and mathematics, they sure as should be able figure such menial tasks out on their own, shouldn’t they?
Sorry the corporate initiative is to use AI for that
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Corporate code is typically terrible anyway. For many years (predating LLMs) I’ve looked askance at my bank’s app with its obvious bugs, wonder how many are not visible. It was not always so (consider SABRE back in the 60s) But it’s the fat part of the bell curve. There’s loads of even worse crap outside corporate code…and at the right end of the bell curve is deeply thought out and the result of long-term maintenance that tends towards as bulletproof as can be possible in this universe, parts of OSes, networking stacks, clocks, and the like. It’s only because that stuff is so robust and sufficiently general that the rest of the world’s steaming pile of code works at all.
This post resonates a lot with me and my approach to counter the idea that an LLM (as amazing as a tool it is) gives programmers permission to stop engineering. To me, executing a decision in the face of trade-offs is what the job is all about. So, I want to keep pulling the thread: is it worth reading—meaning, understanding—the code in order to prevent p95 latency from skyrocketing, avoid OOM death, and keep our apps reliable for customers? The cost of understanding the code is ostensibly very high relative to just using a clanker (citation needed), so does paying that cost translate to value—what is it worth? Concretely, if vibe coding increases bugs and enshittification, but decreases spending without decreasing revenue (read: customers suffer, but they don't leave), do we still need to pay the cost of reading code? Is it better to invest in stickiness, lobbying, and market capture? This comment shouldn't be read as advocating for this; it's a thought experiment about pragmatism and trade-offs, and reflects what I'm witnessing companies (and "programmers") asking themselves. I personally care a lot about understanding systems and code, and I believe I'm paid to do exactly that (I very much enjoy understanding code and nobody is paying me to run a business, so I may be biased in this). In everyday SaaS-land—not talking about critical safety systems—we've seen production databases destroyed, personal data leaked, platforms unwittingly exploited, and UX bugs creep into our operating systems, and yet the companies involved keep on keeping on. Is thinking , meaning taking the time to actually understand what our systems are doing, going to increase their shareholder value?
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I feel like the AI debate is our last best chance to agree that human values are more important and have higher long-term utility (to humans) than pure financial maximization. I think it’s very very likely that money does not capture or convert to a large subset of morally good choices we can and should make to be happy.
Good thing AI is advancing. With UBI it won't be expensive anymore. So much of the economy is simply extractive, most people's jobs are really already highly algorithmic and involve much less "thinking" than they think. Being able to sit around and think has often been a historical luxury - of the elite or those lucky enough to be subsidized by them. I suppose the common (as they all were) man of prehistory also had more time to think, which was doubtless the germ of humanity's religious and speculative impulses. But they also had to contend with a brutal world where death was around every corner. The economy doesn't want you to think. Knowledge workers really have far too high an opinion of themselves in this regard. Your "thinking" was merely more instrumentally useful than the alternatives. Most of us have done very well while inventing nothing. But an even better day dawns. When humans don't have to rely on their own labor to survive, more humans will think. The opportunity to afford to indulge your curiosity as if you were among the wealthy and privileged. A society that can afford the Enlightenment and its myriad avenues at scale. What else will there be to do?
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you sure sound like someone who enjoys a lot of thinking for someone who believes thinking is unnecessary
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