Michelangelo11

First of all, even as someone who already knew a fair bit about the Aztecs, this was horrifying. I had no idea the brutality was that pervasive, that the family as an institution was suppressed that completely, and that zero-sum thinking was apparently the default framework for thinking of society at every level. I'm kind of just speechless.

Second of all, I want to talk about this:

> Perhaps the Mexica themselves are part of that tiny sliver, and out there in the modal logic æther are stable, flourishing civilizations more bizarre than anything we can imagine.

If "bizarre" involves this level of brutality, I'm not too persuaded. As TFA brings up, the Aztec empire lasted only ~200 years, and that short lifespan was in good part due to the brutality.

All the smaller societies around the Aztecs hated them, for obvious reasons, and also the Aztecs were actually pretty bad at war, as Clendinnen discusses. They were focused on incapacitating enemy warriors, not killing them, and had essentially no coordination in battle; the "army" was a mob of warriors each trying to take as many captives as possible. Taking captives was the whole point of war.

Obviously, this kind of behavior can only persist as long as there are a bunch of smaller societies to kick around. The Aztecs were actually quite weak militarily for their size and everyone around them was chomping at the bit to gang up and erase them from existence (which is what happened when the Spanish arrived). These are not the conditions for a stable, flourishing civilization, and they're a direct result of building society around brutality and killing for the sake of killing.

Amen, and I feel exactly the same way. Using it feels awful. It feels seriously user-hostile: Its language is almost totally opaque, it takes every opportunity to criticize you and raise objections to what you give it, it virtually never gives you what you want (you have to guide it firmly and with precision) and it never substantively changes its behavior. Even its apologies, to the extent that matters, have to be forced out and are as thin as you can get when they do arrive.

It feels like it looks down on you and as if it's trying to poke holes in whatever you give it. Over time, i.e. using it for hours, it gets draining in the same way being stuck with a very clever, willfully contrary narcissist would be draining. And it's worse than with a human version -- humans eventually get tired and lose focus. But this thing can always keep churning out tokens, and using it is essentially generating irritation and psychic damage on demand.

It's surreal to be talking about a tool in these terms, but here we are. I'm switching to OpenAI myself, trying to coax a normal personality from this is absolutely not worth it.

> The gloss is not wrong. But it has quietly relocated the word.

Thanks, Fable

This is good, but I think it's missing a discussion of the business logic, which is IMO the mechanism behind the gravity we're discussing here. And really it's just about the fact that you always get more positive attention in an org (and therefore a better shot at promotion etc.) for suggesting and implementing new stuff than pruning what's already there. Pruning only becomes possible when there's a coherent vision, for which you need a small-to-medium team (at most) and one person with the vision in charge of it.

Wft. I have a piddly little Claude Pro account, I use it every day, and Opus 5 and Fable (judiciously used) are very helpful and useful in my work and personal life. I am happy with my setup. Then I read this, and I imagine it's what primitive farming societies felt like when introduced to combine harvesters, high-clearance sprayers and mega tractors.

I am happy on my farm. I like the carrots I plant by hand. I do not wish to control farming equipment worth a small fortune to till acres of land every day.

(P.S. Still not sure if TFA is satire! Obviously, this assumes that it's not.)

No, the issue was that he apparently took direct quotes from participants in another study, reworded them a little, and presented them as quotes from his own participants. This is all in TFA.

In the 80s, something like this was a bona fide video game you could buy in stores:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Suite_(video_game)

Very good too, actually, assuming you enjoy the premise of CYOA in the corporate world. You can play it online for free if you want to give it a whirl.

> Even before this finding, my team had ordered five biopsies to be taken from three regions of my stomach.

This is really invasive and I definitely hope there were solid grounds to order this. If not, his team has a pretty gung-ho approach.

Not sure, I would say it overstates things anyway (it's Twitter, so exaggeration for engagement is par for the course) ... but I would say it's gesturing at something roughly true and it'd be worth discussing the idea.

> Our elbows graze and his windbreaker says “vwip,” “vwop,” the walk feeling almost like a jog until finally he slows, we’re getting ready to jaywalk

The little onomatopoeia feels quite forced and out of place here -- totally the wrong note. FWIW, AI really likes writing that kind of thing, and I wonder to what degree that's influencing actual writers.

I agree, and I'm completely sure it will be better than this, so long as you say just what you want to say.

> Marshall McLuhan gets the credit for the medium is the message, but Claude Shannon had beaten him to a colder version of it years earlier: to a machine moving your words, the meaning doesn’t matter at all; only the medium does, and which of its signals can be told apart. Bravo and Delta survive a bad line; B and D don’t.

> I didn’t arrive there as a mathematician; I’m not one.

> This wasn’t a speed problem I could optimise away. It was a wall, and it asked a question I couldn’t answer

Very strong LLM whiff. A line of thought that constantly, constantly turns back on itself, negating and doubting and qualifying in one way or another, is the biggest tell (the classic "It's not X, it's Y," is only the baldest example).

Noticing that whiff instantly turns me off from reading on.

> Technical debt, I assert without evidence1, grows exponentially, and therefpre it is very important to minimize it in your projects.

This actually seems like a really important idea absolutely deserving of its own blog post.

I'd have to think about the exact argument for why this feels so right, but the kernel would go something like this: whatever you build on those parts of the codebase where you have technical debt incurs new technical debt, because you're building on top of abstractions you'll remove later. The reason you have to remove the new abstractions, too, is that abstractions are like puzzle pieces: their structure determines which other abstractions they can connect with. So, as a rule (there are some exceptions), you can't take out one bad part, replace it with another, and leave everything around it untouched.

And, of course, it's easier to build on top of something creaky but currently serviceable than it would be to first rip that out and replace it, so that's what you do in most cases ... and the whole codebase gets more creaky and less serviceable; you increase the amount of abstractions you'd have to rip out and replace before building something new. The problem does, indeed, grow exponentially.

The argument is free to a good home -- I don't have the time for a full, meticulous elaboration, but I'd love to read one if someone is interested in making it.

Right, and that's also true of physical inventions that you might think are a straightforward application of scientific knowledge. The steam engine is a good example -- it was produced by tinkering, and we devised a theory of how it works much later.

Probably for the vast majority of human inventions, the thing exists long before the theory of the thing. I think that feels counterintuitive in part because examples to the contrary are very conspicuous -- e.g., the A-bomb. But inventions like that, where a theory is meticulously worked out then applied, probably only happen when you have to follow that path for whatever reason -- for the A-bomb, because of enormous capital expenditures. Yet there are countless inventions that came to be only because someone noticed an interesting effect and built something around it (off the top of my head, the microwave is another example), without creating a theory beforehand.

Very, very good essay. I'd like to add one thing to the argument. It used to be the case that your software itself could be a sound moat; that's no longer the case except toward the high end, where vibecoding fails due to complexity. Now, sound moats are e.g. your data, your regulatory advantages, your established customer base, etc., and software is increasingly just a fungible component -- increasingly like, say, accounting: a back-office task to tick off.

I love how in the slide with "It was the goose that created value", the goose has its wings raised. The goose is ... triumphant. Ascendant. Its arc is complete: after being valued at $0, the goose is recognized for the inexhaustible source of value it is. The goose is vindicated.

And finally, in the denouement, we see the goose in serene repose. "It is the Goose itself," we are told, in bold, confident lettering. This is what matters. Not the eggs.

I hope lasagnacat can come back, do a special on this, and hire John Barrymore for the narration, as a spiritual sequel to their Pipe Strip video (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh9oLs67Cw).

https://sive.rs/obvious "Obvious to you. Amazing to others."

Man, the writing has such a strong AI smell. Depressing that it's so common in blog posts now.

"But I am bulwarked and buoyed by knowing that the work I do, that we do, makes AI safer for everybody else.

Today what I found left me shaken, and in tears. This is rare."

The salient thing to me here is that their art kind of just crashed and burned (at least, I conclude so based on the post -- this is the first time I've heard of either of these people), and mental illness does not seem to have had any positive effect on it.

Sure, I think the article is basically correct, as things stand right now ... but the problem is that that wipes out software development as a career: software becomes just a tool that domain experts can spin up to make their jobs easier.

Right, and for example LA is actually full of concealed oil wells pumping oil in the middle of the city (!).

https://www.noemamag.com/its-oil-that-makes-la-boil/

> Fifty-four tightly clustered, slanted oil wells — the last of the Salt Lake Oil Field — sit snuggly between Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and San Vicente Boulevard. In fact, the Beverly Center’s odd, curved footprint is designed to accommodate the drilling site, which is hidden by a wall along the street. The wells are almost completely invisible, dwarfed by the mammoth mall and the sprawling Cedars-Sinai Medical Center across the street — the hospital where I was born and where I later dropped my friend off to meet his wife for an ultrasound appointment.

Came here to post exactly this. Is there, really?

This is all very right, but I'd like to add this: As your capacity to deal with abstraction (which is a function of intelligence and executive function and, to some extent, knowledge) grows, you become more and more constrained by the extent to which you can manipulate symbols. AI-based solutions for that are potentially really powerful, and that's the mechanism through which, as TFA says, "intelligent, educated people with working reward circuitry stand to gain more from AI."

And I'd also add that AI strongly disaggregates the returns to different levels of the capability to deal with abstraction -- higher levels get more, lower levels get less -- rather than uniformly boosting returns across the board (unfortunately). Of course, this has been the trend of information technology since at least the '80s, but now the slice at the top is really small and the returns very high.

Yeah, I think that's a good one, as would be e.g. Guards! Guards!

No idea why the recommendation in that link is Sourcery -- it's not bad, but it has that early Discworld flavor that's really just an extended riff on late '80s / early '90s fantasy and probably wouldn't land with a modern audience.

> Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it.

Edsger Dijkstra, in one of his letters, giving advice (IIRC) to a PhD student: "Do only what only you can do."

Kind of funny to see one of the greatest computer scientists and one of the greatest public entertainers giving the same advice, but I guess that speaks strongly in its favor.

What a good book! I was expecting some "follow your dreams and lean into the hustle" pablum, but no. He talks pretty frankly about how the pursuit of extreme wealth, (100s of millions) which he'd succeeded at, isn't worth it even then because a single-digit amount of millions is quite enough to enjoy life, but adds that he expects readers will ignore that part and attempt to get filthy rich anyway.

Also, he later became a poet (a very good one, too, if I remember right) and early on in his life tried to be a pop singer. Feels a bit like that whole multi-decade career as founder and owner of a massive publishing empire was an odd detour for him.

Very fascinating person, and the book's definitely worth reading.

That was the biggest surprise to me -- they are really, appreciably worse! Why?

One thing that comes to mind is that AI labs are increasingly specializing models for coding and, to a lesser degree, white-collar work in general (writing summaries, reports, etc.), and maybe that comes at the cost of other, unrelated capabilities.

> This is not cosplay. It’s enclothed cognition.

Hard to tell if this is AI-written or if the ubiquity of AI slop is warping the way people write.

Yeah, I get that 100%. Didn't watch it but I'd feel the same way. Of course, the people in that room are highly selected/filtered, but still, clapping for that feels nauseating.

I remember when Matt Taibbi called Goldman Sachs a vampire squid on the face of humanity, and that phrase made the rounds for a while. Feels like it should be repurposed for the AI industry.