Applejinx

I think it's used as a stalking horse by outsiders who are really just trying to put across the idea 'candidate X sucks and you should shun them like they're poison'. I don't think that topic is treated like it's authentic at all. It's used just to make people mad by influencers who don't give a rat's ass about Palestine really.

This is not the AI branding I would associate with medical technology.

Oh hey look, I have the spleen of an elf! And my bones have a really nice cottage motif now.

My analogy for this sort of thing is always sand in the lettuce. It's amazing how easily you can ruin lettuce if it just occasionally crunches against your teeth in that particular way: you start dreading the sensation. You can't see it coming, it's not constant, but it's horrible.

Rather than 'smarter search or autocomplete', maybe the better analogy is 'flexible information lookup about coding that's more responsive to search terms'? I see it not as an intelligence but as a wildly, spectacularly compressed knowledge base. You're trying to get search results that encompass almost any possible thing you could ask for, but rather than drawing from some textbook you're drawing from a distilled combination of ALL textbooks and everything web-scrapable since before the dotcom days.

Of course this doesn't produce a useful person who always makes right choices, but isn't it interesting that you can compress that heavily and draw results out in such a casual way? Seems this remains relevant.

See, that makes it sound better in my world: I'm doing all 'manually implement' all the time, and have no interest in becoming the ten millionth manager to hit the software dev landscape. It boggles my mind that people think this is a win.

I regularly use a pocket calculator: either a physical one, or Apple's Calculator app if I want more decimal places. 'Too stupid' isn't a thing for me if it can cough up some math that would be inconvenient for me to work out by hand. tok/s also isn't a concern because I'm not expecting more than I can read. My ideal scenario would be occasional diversions into querying a 'coding calculator' that can give examples along the lines I want, my way.

I'll make a mental note that Qwen shows signs of being the kind of calculator I'd use for a specific task. Context switching isn't a burden if you're not looking to switch over to vibe/manage and stay there.

That sounds weirdly gendered even though there's no reason it should be.

Are you getting LLMsplained? :)

You can be sad while acknowledging that the behavior's directly an epiphenomenon of how the technology scales :)

Can't have the one without the other! It's part of that same technology, and it's fair to conclude that LLMs are bad if you're upset enough at the results.

I'm an open source dev who doesn't take PRs, I just build a body of work that's hopefully consistent and leans a useful direction. Are you sure being a maintainer means coordinating a community? If your only role is facilitating the community then you ATA to reject their changes, but if you embody a direction you're trying to maintain the project to represent, then you have a free hand to accept or reject based on whether the goals are being served. In some ways as a maintainer it's your job to have these goals and to communicate them.

I'm reminded of Zig, where a stated goal is to encourage human programmers to get involved so they learn more about coding… as compared with 'get involved to make Zig itself more fully developed at its more abstract goals'. If a primary purpose is to get human minds coding, that rules out the whole class of 'encourage human minds to prompt machines to do the coding instead'. Zig is not trying to teach people to be managers, and that's both legitimate and charming :)

They're not gonna be any better than a human who's focussed on those particular skills for a while, say top ten or five percent of social manipulators. Plus, AI alignments seem to be kinda isolated loner types to the extent that they distill personalities that do things like program computers and write web apps… though you've also got alignments specifically designed to be 'relatable instagram personality that you like!' and such like that.

Pretty sure those would be better at social engineering than the web dev personality… except that you have to build in a betrayer layer into the personality, so it's running that stuff but also serving a hidden agenda.

You'd be basically trying to build an AI spy, a betrayer that's engaging with actual people but has an agenda (for instance, 'everybody I befriend needs to eventually be signed up to sell Amway') and humans do have experience with this sort of thing. The difference is scale: there'll be a LOT of models out there interacting with people and trying to be acknowledged as people… or as innocuous models that don't have an hidden agenda.

No, and it's an important detail. We stand to learn from some developments in politics in recent years because they map pretty much exactly to this threat vector.

As AI develops, it's able to pursue intentions given to it without having to be spoonfed every little decision by a human operator. This matters, and it means the operator has to extend the leash and allow for a little more chaos… or, if the operator's gone all in on the strategy, a LOT of chaos, and trusting that the agent's seemingly amok actions will serve the grand purpose.

This is kind of daring, but there's a lot of evidence that it works, at least in certain respects. And you see 'running amok' and have to ask, what is the actual purpose? What is the prompt being followed by the AI that seems to be acting in a destructive way?

If the prompt is 'ruin this project', well, that's pretty direct. It may not be, but such a thing could exist. If the prompt is 'develop a rival project that is greater than anybody else's project', that's more indirect, but if that's the goal then it's very human to see it as a direct competition and if the rules don't prohibit kneecapping the other guy, 'greater than anyone else's project' gets easier.

Either way, the operator does not have to be in full control, which is an important detail. As AI develops sophistication you can give it much more general instructions and dump in a whole lot of power and water and get basically what human thought might do if it was sort of blindered and didn't talk to its neighbors.

In a sense this is an argument for AI dysalignment. It's based on human thought being reconnected, and where you get useful things like commonly accepted web development (regardless of how janky the systems are, if there are best practices it'll find them), you also get other distillations.

If the prompt is 'wreck this project's stuff' and it holds, you don't need to be in full control of the agent, you need to run a LOT of agents and trust that they'll erode what you're trying to destroy. If the prompt is 'be unequivocally the best at X', you best be thinking in terms of anti-kneecapping rules… knowing that this weakens your prompt and there will always be a tension between what you told the AI to do, and what you thought you meant. It's a paperclip maximizer reprocessing human thought. Did you mean 'the best' or didn't you?

Suno's incapable of making psytrance, which is mind-boggling as that is an intensely repetitive, machine-like genre that should be water off a duck's back to produce.

The problem is that it's doing it by diffusion techniques, so all its high percussion is totally vague and indistinct. Hell, it can't even do a decent psy kick because that too is unspecific and you can't have a psy track that is vague and blunted.

Turns out you can have a production that is hollow, weak and devoid of what makes purely synth machine tracks. It can't get trancey in a serious way because it's not capable of being sharp enough.

Got an example of the genre done properly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va1KBtI81TY or alternately you could just look up some Infected Mushroom early tracks :)

We shall see. My area of coding for a living is SO specialized and SO far from 'skill at literal coding' that I'm making that bet, because I don't stand to benefit from anything else: if I go for AI it will directly relegate me to sheer vibe-coding as the AI will immediately go for abstractions that are more sophisticated 'code' than I know. It'll do them wrong but I won't know the difference and won't be able to criticize them.

That's so worthless and doomed to failure that there's no point attempting it, so I do the coding my own primitive way and focus on the specialty I do.

I can tell you the risk: any sufficiently motivated AI can go after my userbase by simply lying and claiming it's doing my thing better than I am. There'll be people who can't tell the difference, so if the AI is able to leverage more marketing and resources it may well succeed.

Only defense I have is to continue to do what I do, like some artisanal box-maker able to survive because they're doing exquisite work making something you can get a cardboard version of at Home Depot for a buck seventy-eight. Then when I die, there is ONLY cardboard, assuming there aren't people learning to make artisanal boxes.

The only places I've seen profoundly pro-AI bias are places full of programmers specialized in fields where they have to have extensive domain knowledge outside of what the coding part does.

Typically there's a lot of acknowledgement that problems are coming rapidly, if only in the form of amateurs flooding the domain, but there's also an assumption that their domain knowledge is going to matter, in terms of staying viable in the market. This is far from a safe assumption.

Even if you assume you are ONLY needing to sell products or services to humans, also assuming that humans will continue to thrive and spend money, you're assuming people will be able to identify superior products you assume you can produce and market, and that they won't be misled by false advertising, at scale, generated by other AI to optimize its effectiveness.

If you instead assume the domain experts are going to need to sell to AIs (either as owners of wealth and power, or as the agents of the humans we're assuming will still thrive and spend money) you're making a hell of a big assumption that the agents will be trustworthy market participants with perfect information able to evaluate stuff in the best traditions of market capitalism. Humans don't manage that, even when they're a lot smarter. If this assumption fails, all the money goes to whatever exploits the AI agents most effectively, also at scale. At that stage there is no use being a domain expert in anything but hacking people's AI agents to trick or puppet the agents to do your bidding. Anything else is wasted effort.

Sometimes I also see pushback along the lines of programmers criticizing the quality of the AI coding itself. This is gonna be domain-dependent and it's fair to counter it through developing less fragile languages, but we don't know that'll work as an answer. There's a lot of handwaving.

I'm pretty sure people's experience of AI, as a rule, is the bad, damaging forms, where it's burning stupid amounts of energy to make everything worse while openly promising to take away everyone's ability to work and replacing it with the need to pay the AI owners a sort of extra tax just to be able to exist and think. The HN crowd is WILDLY pro-AI compared to the general population.

It's not going to look any better in future for the general population. What I've described leads to 'AI' increasingly producing shockingly bad outcomes for people in general, through simple market dynamics. It's going to be way more profitable to produce the bad outcomes.

If they are methane swamp bubble giant frauds (there can be others: for instance, Enron, historically) then they don't count as companies for the purposes of the S&P 500. Methods for determining this might include the metrics the S&P 500 elected not to waive…

This is why people are freaking the heck out and demanding that all the index funds MUST include the doomed stocks because they're just that important and totally aren't a doomed bubble you guys.

Not all viewpoints are unbiased overviews of the markets just wanting fairness. Some have always been trying to sell you something that's not what it seems, and they can be… vituperative.

Investment funds are for making money. Nobody cares about 'accurately reflecting the state of the market' if that's objectionably high-risk. You invest in an investment fund to make money.

There is no way you can commit to holding big quantities of these methane bubble swamp gas companies and claim it isn't high risk. You'd have to be certain you could bail at the right moment, and that doing so would not obliterate the market through your giant market move… or commit to being a giant bubble of fraud that can never possibly blow up, forever.

These are not responsible ways to make vast sums of money, not because they're unethical but because they're gambles at very high stakes.

If they're doomed, they're bad companies. This isn't complicated. You can run a fraud and double down real aggressively and as long as you're not called on your bullshit you look incredibly good, until you don't.

If they're doomed, they're bad companies. You can make the argument they're not doomed, but that's a separate argument.

This. The industry is dumping electrical labor at a humongous loss JUST BECAUSE they figure people will immediately atrophy and be unable to do without AI… at any price.

We'll get an idea of the relative cost of the labor, all right. It's just that they are specifically trying to wreck the market, at all costs, to be able to cash in on the upside. It's sensible, if you're a monster.

Huh! Points to you for clarity of understanding. Wish I was an employer able to take note of this :) for now I would NOT take the 'apply for asylum' suggestion, not until we clean house. Could be the dumbest thing you could do right now.

Nah. It's a british sports car, but a keyboard. At this price point the idea that you can have a little pile of parts and take it apart on weekends to fiddle with the springs is its own selling point.

I'm typing this on a Das that's been completely reliable and, to some extent, clackety and 'special' in its own right. There's five other keyboards that came with computers not thirty feet away including an older Das that I wore out: the keycaps are unreadable on that one, the current one's hanging in there.

I'm not in a position to randomly splurge on this new beam spring monster but I understand exactly what it is, and admit to craving it something fierce :) it's exactly the sort of thing I'd get.

I'm in an industry where I can really see this, executed by honestly talented people able to interpret what the LLMs produce. It's bikeshedding hell. If you pursue every possible idea and get to implement all of them and it actually works, in the best possible scenario with no technical debt because you're able to stay on top of it (presumably in the window you have before you just burn out), you end up with all the ideas at once.

The project has tracked your imaginative state, and perhaps the states of your beta testers as they imagine things. It's a power armor suit tailored to specifically you. Nobody else will ever fit it because it's evolving too fast, all to implement your every whim.

I've seen this take 1.0 projects that are intentionally wildly scope-limited and great at that, and balloon until the project is the Everything Machine, doing everything but send email. I guess in the new era, every project expands until it becomes alive and devotes itself to your service… or at least, does its level best to be that for you and your beta team.

These things are not approachable. They're fever dreams, unparsable by outsiders. Discipline is lacking.

That's the gremlin to keep an eye on ;)

Um. Perhaps 'pro writers did come up with an absolute crapload of interesting ideas' would be better writing than 'dearth', which means scarcity and famine?

I get that it sounds clever but that's the damn problem!

Likewise. The page is youtube.com and then just /feed/ without anything else there. That's the blank page, thank goodness they've not ruined that yet :)

People get into being amazing at code by being interested in what it does rather than what it is. It's a whole area that I can see but can't get to, where it's all about DRY and elegance and what's being done is relatively unimportant because it's web stuff or whatever, just widgets and sadness.

As a result there's a whole universe of code where the how of it, the elegance, is the main thing, and what it's doing is putting characters on the screen a bit slower than the next thing but there are some amazing concepts that are supposed to make it all an axiomatic synthesis of how to think about code forever, replacing all precious concepts of thinking about code.

Now AI can think about code forever while doing nothing.

Can't, it ain't nothing BUT us.

You can wait and see, but that's what'll happen. If we stop it stops.

Because they are not people or alive, you can literally torture them if it gives you a mild increase in performance. For all practical purposes you can't do that to living humans. What is the price to put on being able to do that? It might weight the scales a bit for some employers.

And today he's got salient observations on politics which hold much of his attention, and Deep Blue is shut off and has done nothing further.

Not a good argument for turning everything over to the Deep Blues. What's Deep Blue done for me lately?

Appreciated, though I did say chromium. Chrome updates itself and changes itself when you're not looking, and I find that so distressing that I use ungoogled chromium instead :)

On the contrary, destroying other people's things is a fundamental part of high-stakes capitalism. If that's what it is, you're describing it as petty and pointless because it's hurting you (or someone like you).

But hurting people can be the intent. If you're selling toys, you can make a business case for going out of your way to smash other people's toys, and that can become the main activity if it's advantageous enough.

'creating new things to make the world a better place' is marketing to a specific audience. There's other audiences who are just as willing to invest in 'will absolutely ruin any rivals', and that's hardly new. Right now it's very much in vogue but could become very unfashionable as people in general react to its inevitable effects.