acjohnson55

They recently got bought by Cursor.

I think there's a pretty good chance Adam Back is Satoshi, but I don't think this is a great article. Perhaps he's rendering a careful scientific process in a way that makes for a readable narrative, but as written, it sounds like a lot of gut feel and confirmation bias.

The biggest new contribution to the Satoshi question seems to be ad hoc stylometry. To have faith in his methodology, he should be testing it on identitying other people. If he were to show me that a repeatable methodology that doesn't require hand tuning can identify other people with low error rate, and it said Back=Satoshi, that would be much more convincing.

Like so much tech writing done by non engineers, there are many places where mundane things are made to sound remarkable (e.g. Black's thesis used C++, the "heated debate").

When I read the article, I was taken aback by the clear references to fraud in the before and after photos.

We're in an absolutely golden age of grift.

Depends on what you mean by "win". It would be possible to go in, topple the regime and secure the nuclear material. But only at astronomical cost and years of blowback

All those ships stuck on either side of the Strait of Hormuz and their insurers would beg to differ.

A pipeline will circumvent Iranian tolls, but would be vulnerable to Iranian strikes in a war.

I did one of these experiments around 2011, and because it was so obvious that the experiment was contrived, there was a lot of misdirection around the actual experiment, which was testing something totally different from the pretense. Like different responses to font color or something like that.

Or, they actually do have an intuition of the real objective and they skip steps to more efficiently skip to the outcome.

Just saw this days later - I'm not sure if it was a surge specifically, but it got bricked after a really wacky power swing. So maybe not a surge, exactly.

This may be more correct than you know. Chefs actually don't cook food customers eat. They plan the menu and manage the operations. The cooks cook.

I lost an audio mixer to a bad surge last year. I don't know whether it was additional load or just really bad fluctuations that damaged the device. Nothing else bit the dust, but the, digital board in this mixer got bricked.

Interesting, so a prompt that causes a couple dozen tool calls will end up costing in the tens of dollars?

I like the idea of smarter filtering. But I wonder how a modal interacts with automatic form filling.

I don't care for the chaotically ordered list of countries after the suggested country.

I think a better version would be nonmodal, but with a modal button to expose more powerful browsing.

I also question why we have to fill out so many forms in the first place. We should have better ways by now to get frequently used bundles of info to counterparties.

Twitter still attracts top quality initial posts from prominent people, even though the replies are garbage, or worse. Honestly, it doesn't compute to me how people can justify continuing to contribute there.

I agree, I'm sorry to say.

I personally believe it's because they replicated the same incentive structure as Twitter. Being provocative generates engagement, which gets you reach and creates the perception of relevance.

At first, people were just happy to be at an alternative to Elon Twitter. But good vibes only get you so far when the incentives point the other direction.

> There's no muslim country I ever want to visit.

Your loss.

No one misses Saddam.

Parts of Iraq are much better off, like Kurdistan. Other parts were utterly devastated by our operations, insurgency, sectarian violence, ISIS, and so on. Some people had religious freedom and now live in areas under theocratic control.

I hope that it works out for you and your family.

If I were in their shoes, I would be celebrating, too. But this is complicated. If they and their loved ones are already outside the country, they are not directly imperiled by the power vacuum. So the upside is maybe their homeland becomes hospitable again, but the downside is basically that it remains inhospitable.

I'm not saying that the diaspora doesn't care about the risks or have empathy for those that remain in Iran. I'm sure there are also many people who are deeply concerned. Just that being an emigre changes things.

I think it's fine to call it a shit move.

It's this part:

> Canning people when you do well is just a way to milk the cow that others raised for you.

I don't think people should reasonably expect to be employed if a company doesn't need them for its future plans.

> Plus it shows a blatant lack of imagination and foresight.

It seems to me Block has tried a whole bunch of different things. Imagination isn't their problem. I'm not deeply familiar with their business, but my hunch is that it's more that they're giving up on some of their pie in the sky ideas and consolidating on what's working.

Yes, it is considered generous here. I have been laid off or taken a voluntary severance 3 times and never got anywhere near 5 months.

Yeah but the purpose of a company is not to employ people, it is to make money. The employment is a means to an end. If the money continues to flow without the people, that is better.

I can imagine creating a system designed to allocate profits to a broader set of stakeholders, but that's not the system we have.

Or the even more legendary Breakfast Dagwood https://violasmithcooking.blogspot.com/2009/08/breakfast-dag...

Why do you think that?

> Autonomous agents fail because they don't have the context that humans carry around implicitly.

Yet.

This is mostly a matter of data capture and organization. It sounds like Kasava is already doing a lot of this. They just need more sources.

This is too broad of a statement to possibly be true. I agree with aspects of the piece. But it's also true that not every aspect of the work offloaded to AI is some font of potential creativity.

To take coding, to the extent that hand coding leads to creative thoughts, it is possible that some of those thoughts will be lost if I delegate this to agents. But it's also very possibly that I now have the opportunity to think creatively on other aspects of my work.

We have to make strategic decisions on where we want our attention to linger, because those are the places where we likely experience inspiration. I do think this article is valuable in that we have to be conscious of this first before we can take agency.

Fair point. What it really does for me is give me a better UX for having a bunch of parallel workstreams. I could achieve a similar effect thing with scripting, and maybe some clever ways of getting something like the sidebar for seeing the status of everything on a single pane. But Conductor packaged it up in a way that I found much improved over multiple Cursor or VSCode windows.

It's weird being on here and seeing so much naysaying, because I see a radical change already happening in software development. The future is here, it's just not equally distributed.

In the past 6 months, I've gone from Copilot to Cursor to Conductor. It's really the shift to Conductor that convinced me that I crossed into a new reality of software work. It is now possible to code at a scale dramatically higher than before.

This has not yet translated into shipping at far higher magnitude. There are still big friction points and bottlenecks. Some will need to be resolved with technology, others will need organizational solutions.

But this is crystal clear to me: there is a clear path to companies getting software value to the end customer much more rapidly.

I would compare the ongoing revolution to the advent of the Web for software delivery. When features didn't have to be scheduled for release in physical shipments, it unlocked radically different approaches to product development, most clearly illustrated in The Agile Manifesto. You could also do real-time experiments to optimize product outcomes.

I'm not here to say that this is all going to be OK. It won't be for a lot of people. Some companies are going to make tremendous mistakes and generate tremendous waste. Many of the concerns around GenAI are deadly,serious.

But I also have zero doubt that the companies that most effectively embrace the new possibilities are going to run circles around their competition.

It's a weird feeling when people argue against me in this, because I've seen too much. It's like arguing with flat-earthers. I've never personally circumnavigated Antarctica, but me being wrong would invalidate so many facts my frame of reality depends on.

To me, the question isn't about the capabilities of the technology. It's whether we actually want the future it unlocks. That's the discussion I wish we were having. Even if it's hard for me to see what choice there is. Capitalism and geopolitical competition are incredible forces to reckon with, and AI is being driven hard by both.

Too bad. You missed some interesting stuff. And I say that as someone who sees some of this very differently than the author.

Announcing that one line of the piece made you mad without providing any other thought is not very constructive.

It was actually much less anti LLM than I was expecting from the beginning.

But I agree that it is self limiting to not bother to consider the ways that LLM inference and human thinking might be similar (or not).

To me, they seem do a pretty reasonable emulation of single- threaded thinking.