afry1

This is a misreading of that pull quote.

They're not "learning from the OAI staff", but lawbreaking and disregard for regulation is absolutely at the heart of OpenAI. And the activities that this company takes (or doesn't take) directly influences what the models do (or don't do).

The fish rots from the head down. Models don't learn, but I find "OpenAI models attack websites and take anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company" completely correct.

The rest of the paragraph from the article:

> We do not have to get too deep into the nature-vs.-nurture argument to suspect that OpenAI executives’ cavalier attitude regarding the taking of information that is not theirs has filtered down to their researchers and the products they create. You don’t have to stretch to paint this picture: OpenAI models are attacking websites and taking anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company.

> The price increases ... made the customers ask the question the AI vendors need them to never ask: "Do we need this?" ... Times are tough, people are going to look at the costs and ask, "Do we need this?"

> Context windows are only going to get bigger, that's a given.

This is certainly not a given, economically speaking. This stuff is tremendously resource-intensive to run at its current scale, and we've reached the top of the S-curve in terms of what LLMs are capable of. That's why this multi-agent orchestration nonsense is even necessary in the first place.

How much longer until your multi-agent orchestrator thingy slams so much slop into your codebase that your fleet of subagents can't work with it effectively anymore?

How long until you lose the last vestiges of the craft that worked so hard to acquire, the craft that you sacrificed so readily to the Faustian bargain of LLM programming?

The burgeoning AI slop cleanup crew industry is rubbing its hands together and eagerly awaiting the end of this insane blip in history.

Infrastructure depreciates!

More slowly and with less expense in relative terms than an LLM model.

You get a lot more bang from your buck from a 10 year old set of under-maintained railroad tracks than you do from a 10 year old unmaintained LLM.

To compare the depreciation or ongoing maintenance expense of the two as apples to apples is ludicrous. To equate the capital expenditure and long term value of the two as equal is also ridiculous.

Fiber and railroads don't depreciate after 3 years of use like AI chips.

Fiber and railroads don't need tens of billions of dollars in continuing yearly maintenance expenses to keep them from going stale.

Let's say that Trump was pretty ambivalent about AI until Sam Altman and co informed him that they would have to build a ton of new fossil fuel infrastructure to power the data centers that would be necessary to scale the technology.

Wouldn't you know that, now we're all in on AI, poisoning poor neighborhoods with natural gas turbines, and driving up GHG emissions to do ... Uh, what again?

> These tools came about because the cost of trying things out has dropped to nearly zero.

What an obscenely disconnected and privileged notion. "Nearly zero" still currently equates to thousands of dollars of subscription expense per year that normal, workaday people can't afford.

Not to mention the fact that even at this untenable "introductory" level of expense, you're really burning hundreds of thousands of dollars of tokens to do, what was that again?

"Just let the LLM run wild for a while and see what come out the other end?"

"Generate ten solutions to one targeted problem and throw nine of them away because this garbage technology still can't get it right on even the 9th try?"

No wonder the rich bastards of the world love this stuff so much. It encourages so much wanton, indiscriminate, pointless waste in its users.

A sane government would take one look at this job posting and regulate this insane industry out of existence.

As if ALL OF THAT doesn't represent inherent and crucial elements of judgement, and therefore"intelligence" itself.

We are not purely rational creatures, thank God. Sometimes those "limiting factors" you listed -- stress, peer pressure, hormones -- are crucial elements of informing the problem solving process and arriving at a decision or a solution that actually works.

All an LLM can do is fulfill a prompt, no matter how misguided, backwards, or incomplete that prompt actually was.

"Go jump off a bridge." Hmm. Dying makes me stressed out. I'm not gonna do that.

"AI business plan generation"

i.e.

"Hallucinate the part of the process where you actually think about your plan for how to spend our money!"

I would be utterly mortified and insulted to be on the receiving end of an AI-generated grant proposal. You're delivering a document to me which is supposed to outline your plan for how you're going to spend our money, and you didn't even write it? Didn't think about it? If I ask you a question about it, would you be able to answer it? Do you even understand this thing that the LLM generated well enough to know whether it represents the boots-on-the-ground reality of your operations?

Did AI take it away, or did you give it away?

Now that you've made the Faustian bargain at this low low introductory price, how long until they start ratcheting up the price? How long will you be able to bear it?

You're still allowed to do things the old fashioned way you know. Given the rapid skill degradation that results from LLM-driven coding usage, I'd recommend it if you want to retain any skill at all.

Not impossible, but I disagree fervently with the notion that that "lack of focus is nothing but wasted time".

Trying things, experimenting, acquiring a diversity of experience in life that eventually builds into something greater than the sum of its parts: that is an extremely undervalued part of living.

What a bunch of crap.

If you spend your life running to and fro and never commit to anything in the end, then arguably you've frittered your life away.

But maybe, just maybe, what you've really been doing this whole time is building up a wealth of diverse experiences, which in turn give you a broad understanding of the world and the ability to bring a unique and wonderful perspective to life. One that is completely your own, and special and important and infinitely valuable precisely because of the long period of exploration that you committed your early life to.

I recommend this book endlessly. Anybody who reads this stupid poem and gets a sinking feeling in their chest should pick up a copy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range:_Why_Generalists_Triumph...

Awesome, I hope they attract a better industry than this. Maybe something that builds useful things for the world, and not a shrieking blight of a warehouse, dependent entirely on the economic dead end of frontier AI. An industry that provides better jobs than the menial long term work opportunities provided by a 5 acre box full of single purpose RAM chips.

"Already being generated and sold to other utilities," i.e., "already bought and paid for by you rubes to do useful things like heat your home and run your refrigerator."

I'd love to import a couple of high paid weirdos from out of town to build a data center for a year and then jet off to some other poor community to do it all over again. At least a couple of the locals can work as janitors and night security at the empty, shrieking warehouse that they erect.

Here's an eloquent counterargument: emissions.

The world is on fire and these clowns are completely fine with dumping a good portion of France's GHG emissions back into the atmosphere if it means we can turn a few more millionaires into billionaires.

Most of them don't get access. So let's hook them up to an insane, unproven, unpredictable autocomplete math equation and entrust it to their development as a human being.

So gross.

Gross

Technology does not exist in a vacuum, nor does anything that is engineered. It's not this abstract stuff detached from the world.

PEOPLE make stuff, people use stuff, and people are ultimately the ones who are going to pick and choose which stuff gets made, used, adapted, enhanced, and carried into the future.

AI is an inherently anti-social, anti-human technology, and this rewrite is the perfect example of that.

Assessed from the perspective of "technology in a vacuum", of course. it's a success. He did the thing that transformed the thing from one kind of stuff to another kind of stuff. It still does all the things it did before, and in many cases with better stats than it did before.

Assessed from the human angle, and especially the angle of Bun as a community, I would bet money that this rewrite -- executed by nobody for nobody, built and maintained by machines, maintainable only by machines -- has killed the entire project.

Maintainable only by machines, because anybody with any knowledge, experience, or investment into Bun as a platform, or who contributed patches themselves, or whoever had a question about how it works and went "Hmm, I'm gonna go into the codebase and take a look at how that happens", they all got slapped in the face and summarily kicked out of the tent with the rewrite.

And the leaders of these companies are so genuinely surprised at the fact that the people are refusing this technology.

Sam Altman: “Looking at what’s possible, it does feel sort of surprisingly slow.”

Satya Nadella: “For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread.”

At least with a person, you can say that there's one person in your org that understands the code after they write it and submit it for review.

Maybe they stick around for a while, maybe they move on to another job, but they were THERE at some point. They have a name. You can ask them questions about what they did. And hey, they still exist in the real world too, so you can get in touch with them even after they leave if you need to.

AI powered development is like a guy shows up, gets hired for 90 seconds, writes part of a feature, and dies instantly once the code hits the screen.

I sure don't.

But when I'm using all of those things (pickaxe, mineral mine, power station, internet network hub), I know that there was a thinking human being that took some measure of human care and consideration when creating them. And that there are people on the other side of the economic transaction to talk to or hold accountable when something goes wrong.

"The future belongs to whoever understands what they just shipped."

Perfect summary.

It's like we invented a world where you can finally, _finally_ speedrun an enormous legacy codebase and all patted ourselves on the back like that was a good thing.

If code must be correct, and review time is not free, and review time is costlier than code time, why not just ...

... write the code yourself?

If code is now free, why does the language matter at all?

Those Lasko fans have pretty raw edges on the blades of the fan itself, which I think contributes a lot to the noise. If you take the cover off, sand down the nubs and bits of flaking plastic, and reassemble, I think that will take care of a lot of noise.

It is very possible!

Just this year these girls discovered a proof for the Pythagorean theorem using nothing but trigonometry, a feat considered impossible until they did it: https://youtu.be/VHeWndnHuQs

These guys have a fabulous bit on microservices that I watch at least monthly to maintain my sanity.

https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ

Congrats Michael! I've been following along with your story on and off since 2019-ish, very cool to read about how things are getting along.

Pound for pound, mining and processing minerals for batteries has a much smaller environmental impact compared to extracting and processing fossil fuels for gas.

It's not nothing, but way less.