aerhardt

He sold $20 worth of lemonade the other day, which comes to about $175k annualized.

What's your ARR, anyway?

I haven't done it in a production project - this will be the first time for me. I have specified the architecture and data definitions pretty well. The tests will be run against the customer's Excels, which is what the warehouse will be replacing. I'll check the general shape of pipelines, models, orchestration code, etc. but in many parts I probably won't review the code myself.

I've used Astra, Fable 5.1, Sol 5.6, Opus 5. They're definitely making progress and the proof is in the pudding - I reach for the most advanced model as much as I can. But I wouldn't say their capabilities have increased dramatically. I use it for both coding and non-coding workloads and I don't feel I can do anything dramatically different. Again at the end of the day this is a debate on semantics because we can have very different definitions of "dramatic improvement".

(I'm not factoring the benchmarks into the discussion, because I've never quite cared about them)

I still develop in smaller chunks, checking nearly all the output. However I have a work project (building the warehouse and BI for a client) that is well-specified and where I will try to few-shot the development. Hope it delivers.

I really enjoy the balance of speed and accuracy of Astra. I can definitely see it become my driving model for most tasks, technical and non-technical.

However, I don't see it as such a massive leap compared to Fable or Sol. As ever, there's a mismatch between the benchmarks and my daily experience of the models.

What do you all think about Astra now that it's been out for a few weeks?

Is this your idea of an intelligent contribution to the conversation?

There is plenty of evidence in the article from real professors at real universities (ex: Princeton), saying that they’ve had to dramatically cut reading workloads from humanities courses. I’ve heard similar things from European universities.

Other hard evidence is in plummeting reading comprehension scores in many countries that participate in PISA.

In the States, there is plenty of other stats that point that students are below their expected reading grade - the worse in generations.

And all you have to contribute is that this is “idiotic”? The irony. Inform yourself.

Like I said in another comment, this famous article by the Atlantic [1] has pretty convincing testimony that kids studying the humanities at elite universities can't read either.

I agree with the sentiment that we tend to misrepresent the culture of mass societies, as if at one point in time there were droves of people reading Aristotle. But the ability to read and our transition to an oral or post-literate culture is very much affecting elites too. There is pretty good evidence when you compare contemporary histories. Or if you live in a bourgeois milieu, you just need to ask around.

I don't think that reading necessarily makes you a better person. I've met a good amount of people of the highest moral dignity who do not read. But on the whole, reading helps build competence - moral and technical - and create a sense of shared culture. Going back to an "oral culture" is nothing but a regression.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...

One of the reasons why we read less long-form, according to a bunch of cognitive science studies and to my own anecdotal experience, is because our attention is shot.

A viral article in The Atlantic [1] shows evidence and testimony that kids at elite universities simply can't read anymore. I've seen the claim repeated in many other places and looking around me I believe it. Those kids are not replacing Dostoevsky or Aristotle with more compact versions of it.

The airport book industry is indeed full of books that could be fit in ten pages. But there's a universe of useful - potentially life-changing - books beyond that, and not only in the humanities. Some modern technical books justify their length. I seriously doubt that something like The Data Warehouse Toolkit can be replaced by reading piecemeal blogposts online.

Same goes for history, I sincerely doubt you can properly learn it in depth without reading long-form. In my experience, people who only listen to history podcasts or consume 10-minute videos tend to have a much poorer command of the facts and of the broader motions of history.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...

It's a load-bearing poster.

Sorry for defending Aristotle? Have we lost the plot as a society?

Claude Design with Fable 5 is an absolute killer app that you’d have to pry from my cold dead hands.

I’m not an Anthropic fanboy - Codex has been my daily coding driver for the last year.

But my point is these companies are building app + model combos that are very sticky. Certainly not as much as an OS, but much more than the “there is no moat” crowd give them credit for.

One can almost smell the vibes.

This is peanuts compared to a major cybersecurity catastrophe that’s surely in the making.

To give credit to the technology and the people using it - and I’m not being facetious - it’s actually incredible that at the current levels of usage the unprecedented catastrophic event has not yet happened.

I'd be scared shitless to even try something like this. There is just a pretty website, a video, and a blog post. No info on the founders, I can't find anything on LinkedIn, just a company Vineyard Finance LTD that was incorporated last year.

We're all unhinged about the data we're giving LLMs but here I'd draw the line. I'd rather keep paying the small amount I pay to have my accounts done.

My guide was to pick the best model on "High" for 99% of tasks.

The website linked is an utter mess. In design and performance.

AI can be used in classification, extraction, and synthesis quite effectively. Not to speak of code generation, or like the author says, for research and strategy.

In enterprise workflows these are essentially super generalizable NLP and CV models that can be developed and deployed at a fraction of the cost.

This is not what the tech bros promised but it’s still pretty damn good!

His criticism of characters being laid bare at the beginning of the novel is fair, especially in Karamazov. Unlike Nabokov I don't think it detracts from the work.

Dostoyevsky was massively popular way before the USSR. Nietzsche and Freud were huge admirers. His book sold well in Europe in his lifetime. Same with Tolstoy. Sincerely doubt the USSR soft power moved the needle in any meaningful sense.

I'm reading Crime and Punishment now. I've previously read Karamazov. I agree that it's not particularly hard reading other than the names. And also, maybe, the characters tend to go on long tirades. And I guess you need to know a little bit of Russian history, too. But they're not that difficult. Otherwise his books wouldn't have been that popular. They sold phenomenally well in his lifetime and continue to do so.

Google Stadia worked like a charm. I put hundreds of hours into it without a single problem. The tech felt like magic.

I studied in a French Lycée in Spain. We did dissertations, brutal 3h live writing tests. There was no problem with it other than the difficulty. Kids didn’t come out screwed up or impaired.

The parent comment is AI generated drivel, that’s why. Incredible that it has generated such a lively discussion.

I don't know what to tell you bro. I type much less code but I haven't stopped thinking altogether. I still write to myself and to others. I read longform. I walk and introspect. I think about high level problems. Any general cognitive decline I ever notice, I attribute to having a bad day or getting old...

I'm sure they think of them as a matter of national security, because they think of everything as a matter of national security, but a few analysts I respect say that the mood there is not nearly as AGI-pilled, and I have no trouble believing that.

You say soon but what you just described is still sci-fi as far as I can tell.

I’ve seen analyses pointing to the fact that the gap is growing, which would be worrying. I think all the benchmarking and whatnot is not reliable so who knows, but we’ll definitely have a good feel in a couple of years.

Well, if you believe the people who sell the tokens, you should be creating loops that keep yanking the bandit’s arm.

This is utopian thinking. The products are way too useful to not subscribe. The argument presupposes the worst-case negative-utility in the long-term scenario (AI companies will create a totalitarian nightmare) and pits it against the radical usefulness that the products are creating right now.

It’s perfectly reasonable to believe that a law of marginal decreasing returns will kick in at some point (if it hasn’t already), and that what one point looked like an exponential may start looking like an s-curve.

I do not see how being experienced in engineering, or having higher studies in computer science and economics should make that view less common.

It tests general reading comprehension. Is it possible that a generation with abysmal reading comprehension and attention copiously reads for pleasure? Yes, but I’m very doubtful.