CityOfThrowaway

You can imagine:

1. I have a bunch of data or research that I've gathered with a unique hypothesis

2. Having gotten my arms around that pile of information, I believe I have a compelling thesis to put forth

3. I design the narrative arc and of the thesis. The important parts, the necessary but not sufficient scaffolding.

4. An AI helps fill in the story from there. Fact checks each claim, connects the dots, makes it comprehensible.

Who is this for? Well, quite possibly the human who asked for it. It's pretty informative to read back a research brief in full that you helped do the scaffolding.

Also of very clear use is other AI's who did not have the same unique hypothesis and did not gather the supporting evidence. It's an interesting angle for others to build on.

And of course, other humans! Most human written content gets almost zero readers today as it is. And I suppose LLM content probably pulls the asymptote closer to zero, but some pieces of content may be genuinely interesting or useful.

Europe loves to regulate, which absolutely reduces your ability to adopt

This particular company is literally bootstrapped and makes hundreds of millions of dollars profitably

Then the offers are fair and your assessment of your labor value is disproven by the market rate.

Using your own logic, if we need investors to make the whole thing work, then an investor playing their role has obviously earned their take. If they didn't exist, many things would simply never have been created.

So what? He owned the stock, he gets to share in the gains.

If we believed that the only people who should be morally allowed to benefit from asset appreciation are the people who actively work for that company, the entire economy would collapse.

For example, every pension fund, endowment, retirement fund, etc. are all invested in financial assets that they had NO role in. All they do is own something that become more valuable as other people labor and innovate! Shall we cast them as evil capitalists?

This is usually founder-led not investor led

I've raised venture from a lot of the big firms (and a lot of small firms) and have never had any of them attempt to force me to use anything.

It's a term of art that straightforwardly means people who embrace AI-assisted programming. As opposed to the very large number of engineers who actively don't like it, or have enough change aversion to have avoided it.

Sure, but we're talking about Coinbase, which is a relatively young company not staffed with a bunch of old people in the first place.

It's totally random to accuse them of using "AI-native" to fire old people.

No, it's obviously not. There is nothing about being old that prevents you from being AI-native.

In some sense, the fun pockets still exist of course.

On the other hand, the algorithmic schelling points starve weird-ish corners of scale. The network effects + psychological draw of the single stream feeds is a powerful force.

The algorithmic spaces still have lots of weird. Maybe more weird than ever. But they also feel more bled of community (or even iterated contact with the same people).

It's a strange combination of facts. Maybe OPs post is not true in the literal sense, but it feels correct in the spiritual sense.

OTOH, if you're willing to accept human-level error rates... why would you not do so at a burst-scalable task per minute and 1/1000th the cost?

I've built large human data entry operations. Variable throughput, monotony, hiring and perf management and firing, management, quality management. All of these things are large investments of human effort and money.

If I can achieve the same quality level (or in some use cases, even slightly degraded output) with software scaling characteristics and costs... I see zero reasons outside regulatory compliance reasons to have people do it.

I think this is a bit dramatic of a comment. Credit card numbers relayed over the phone are not deterministic...

"four three uh let's see sorry my vision is bad six eight..."

Easy versions of problems are easy. But reality is messy.

And no, neither I nor anybody else is expecting a 50B parameter model to find every instance. But finding 90% or 95% or 99% is pretty good, and sufficiently good for many use cases.

I dunno what use case you're thinking this is for.

The use case for this is that many enterprise customers want SaaS products to strip PII from ingested content, and there's no non-model way to do it.

Think, ingesting call transcripts where those calls may include credit card numbers or private data. The call transcripts are very useful for various things, but for obvious reasons we don't want to ingest the PII.

> Regarding bad weather; if winter is bad enough for bicycles to fail, then certainly it is not safe to drive either

This is a big claim with no justification.

Cars have dynamic traction control, internal temperature control, etc. You may get frost bite on your bicycle, but almost certainly not in your car. Having four wide wheels makes the vehicle radically more stable.

Add seat belts, air bags, etc. cars have far more safety features than a bike can.

Of course, cars go faster and going faster increases lethality at the limit. No argument there, far more people die in cars in general. But specifically concerning weather, cars allow people to do many things that a bicycle cannot.

Not to mention general comfort. Being in a bike in a snow storm is very unpleasant!

This basically boils down to, "Sure, we recommended you work with scammy low-quality auditors, but if you actually use them it's your own fault... we're just an automation tool!"

In other words, I'm reading this as effectively a full admission that the claims are true but the company is saying not their responsibility.

Very, very bad.

You say that there's no skill in using AI, and then go on to explain how you used AI in an unskilled way to produce something that neither worked correctly nor taught you anything.

It strikes me that if you developed your skill set around using AI more effectively, you could have both developed a deep understanding and gotten what you wanted, and done it in less time and at higher quality than you could have done solo.

That said, the fact that you can use AI in an unskilled way to produce something kinda cool... is itself kinda cool! It means there's an on-ramp to using AI! People with no skills can get started, same day, and make stuff. And over time, can learn to make even better stuff! That's pretty cool to me.

Are they your ideas if they go through a heavy-handed editor? If you've had lots of conversations with others to refine them?

I dunno. There's ways to use LLMs that produces writing that is substantially not-your-ideas. But there's also definitely ways to use it to express things that the model would not have otherwise outputted without your unique input.

I'm anon, but also the farthest thing from a progressive, so I find this post amusing.

I don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying but I also have a different frame.

Even if we take your claim that LLMs don't make people better writers as true (which I think there's plenty to argue with), that's not the point at all.

What I'm saying is people are communicating better. For most ideas, writing is just a transport vessel for ideas. And people now have tools to communicate better than they would have been.

Most people aren't trying to become good writers. That's true before, and true now.

On the other hand, this argument probably isn't worth having. If your frame is that LLMs are expensive toys that ruin everything -- well, that's quite an aggressive posture to start with and is both unlikely to bear a useful conversation or a particularly delightful future for you.

In a lot of ways, I'm thankful that LLMs are letting us hear the thoughts of people who usually wouldn't share them.

There are skilled writers. Very skilled, unique writers. And I'm both exceedingly impressed by them as well as keenly aware that they are a rare breed.

But there's so many people with interesting ideas locked in their heads that aren't skilled writers. I have a deep suspicion that many great ideas have gone unshared because the thinker couldn't quite figure out how to express it.

In that way, perhaps we now have a monotexture of writing, but also perhaps more interesting ideas being shared.

Of course, I love a good, unique voice. It's a pleasure to parse patio11's straussian technocratic musings. Or pg's as-simple-as-possible form.

And I hope we don't lose those. But somehow I suspect we may see more of them as creative thinkers find new ways to express themselves. I hope!

As the saying goes, "If you're not a liberal when you're 2.5, you have no heart, and if you're not a conservative by the time you're 4.5, you have no brain"

But should it? To whom is that useful?

Completely agree. On the autism spectrum, I'm almost certainly very low. But going through the simulator felt like... yeah this all sucks but is very much in the realm of things that I experience and feel on any given day. It didn't feel enlightening, it felt deeply familiar.

It's definitely the case that some people have a much larger magnitude of experience or persistence of experience. And for some, it's at levels that do make functioning in society quite difficult or impossible.

And yet, I think the point you are quite rightly making is that many people who are decidedly low on the spectrum are now adopting the identity of autism as a way to explain why life is hard.

I don't know why people feel inclined to adopt the label. I don't care that they do, they can call themselves whatever they want. But I do wonder if there are more productive ways of perceiving yourself, if you are indeed very much capable of functioning in society.

It's sarcasm

Yes, it might be true that most people aren't willing to keep their money under their beds for security reasons.

But it shouldn't be illegal or somehow indicative of criminality.

Same thing with self custody of crypto.

One of the ways you know if you're really practicing this is if you actively disqualify potential customers after the first call.

Not them disqualifying you, but you actively saying, "Hey, not sure we are the right solution for you. Seems like you're trying to achieve X, but we're really better fit if you're trying to achieve Y."

This is in lieu of trying to convince them that you're a good fit for X, or that they should actually really be wanting to achieve Y.

Quick disqualification is sort of a counter-intuitive idea for a lot of throughput maximizing engineers. Shouldn't we want to optimize every lead?

Perhaps, but I think the better frame is optimizing productive seller-minutes. And time spent on deals that should die (and probably will die, eventually) is definitely not optimized.

There's two ways to answer this:

1. On one hand, walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc, are most of the internet and they decidedly use React (or similar) frameworks. So from that perspective, the statement is sorta trivially true.

2. There may well be a horde of websites that are pure HTML rendering. But, those sites are not largely being developed by developers – they are being generated by platforms (like Squarespace, etc.) so are out of the scope of "sites and apps built by developers"

All this is stated without data, of course.

The idea here is right, but the word "debt" is not the right word at all.

A burden, a liability, a drag. But not debt.

I agree that it might not be reasonable to expect people to keep up with the latest.

For this specific thing (LLM-assisted coding), we are still in nerd territory where there are tremendous gains to be had from keeping up and tinkering.

There's a lot of billions dollars being invested to give devs who don't want to do this the right tools. We aren't quite there yet, largely because the frontier is moving so fast.

I made my original comment because it was so far from my experience, and I assumed it was because I am using a totally different set of tools.

If somebody really doesn't want to be left behind, the solution is to do the unreasonable: read hacker news everyday and tinker.

Personally, I enjoy that labor. But it's certainly not for everybody.