anonymous908213

I don't know how you can write that list and come to the conclusion that it's not winner-take-all. In their home market (US), Uber is ~75%, Lyft is ~25%, and all other competitors are sub-1% combined. Didi is similarly dominant in China, and so on. "Completely different markets have different winners taking it all" does not counteract the claim of winner-takes-all in any way, nor does listing utterly insignificant players like BlackWolf. Do you think people saying "winner-takes-all" in business contexts mean one company with literally 100% marketshare globally?

> I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned.

This seems like a false dichotomy. You don't have to do this. It is still possible to build magical things. But agents aren't it, I don't think.

It is honestly extremely depressing to read this coming from a founder of Relic. Relic built magic. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes formed an important part of my teenage years. I formed connections, spent thousands of hours enjoying them together with other people, and pushed myself hard to become one of the top 100 players on the CoH leaderboards. Those competitive multiplayer games taught me everything there was to know about self-improvement, and formed the basis of my growth as an individual - learning that if I put my mind to it, I could be among the best at something, informed my worldview and led me to a life of perpetually pushing myself to further self-improvement, and from there I learned to code, draw, and play music. All of that while being part of amazing communities where I formed friendships that lasted decades.

All of this to say, Relic was magic. The work Relic did profoundly impacted my life. I wonder if you really believe your current role, "building trust infrastructure for AI agents", is actually magic? That it's going to profoundly impact the lives of thousands or millions?

I'm sorry for the jumbled nature of this post. I am on my phone, so I can't organize my thoughts as well as I would like. I am grateful to you for founding Relic, and this post probably comes off stupidly combative and ungrateful. But I would simply like to pose to you, to have a long think if what you're doing now is really where the magic is.

Edit: On further consideration, it's not clear the newly-created account I'm responding to is actually Alex Garden. The idea of potentially relating this personal anecdote to an impersonator is rather embarrassing, but I will nonetheless leave this up in the hope that if there are people who built magical things reading this, regardless of whether they're Alex Garden or someone else, that it might just inspire them to introspection about what building magic means, about the impact software can have on people's lives even if you don't see it, and whether this "agent" stuff is really it.

Sure, I guess? I feel like this is getting rather in the weeds and will not necessarily lead the conversation in any kind of particularly productive direction, but I will nonetheless take the opportunity to promote what I consider to be excellent writing. Dan Luu is a favorite of mine, and offers what I find to be a much more rewarding use of reading time. A sample picked basically at random: https://danluu.com/ftc-google-antitrust/

For some reason people frequently suggest that my problem with LLM writing is that it's too good. Allow me to restate that I find fault with how the article is written, and that I do not in any way perceive this to be good writing. The flaws happen to manifest in a way that I would expect LLM flaws to manifest, which I also do not find to be good writing. I do not find LLMs to have absorbed good technical writing tendencies at all. Instead they absorb sensationalist tendencies that are likely both more common in their dataset and that are likely intentionally selected for in the reinforcement learning phase. Writing which is effective, in the same way that clickbait headlines and Youtube thumbnails are effective, but not good. I felt as though this article was, through its headers and overuse of specific rhetorical devices, constantly trying to grab my attention in that same shallow manner. This gets tiring at length, and good technical writing does not need to engage in such tendencies.

If you disagree and find this to be good writing, you are entitled to your opinion, but nonetheless this is my own feedback on the article.

These headers are quite exhausting:

> Message queues are version time capsules

> Event sourcing: the version problem as a way of life

> Temporal and bitemporal databases: time as a first-class citizen

> Semantic drift: the type didn’t change, but the meaning did

> Knowing what’s running changes everything

> What if the old code just kept working?

> The right tools, pointed at the wrong level

Presentation matters as much as content. Particularly if you want somebody to read 10,000 words, making that reading go down smoothly is a good thing to strive for. If this was by chance written by a human who happened to have absorbed LLM-like writing tendencies, I would still find fault in this article for how it is written, and would suggest they spend more time revising it rather than publishing a 5k-10k word technical article daily. Much like writing code, sheer lines written is not the goal; the actual goal is to succinctly and clearly represent your ideas in as refined a form as possible. This article dragged on and on and on, with fatiguing prose, for an idea that can be well expressed without such length.

This article, despite clocking in at nearly 10,000 words, appears to have been written in only two days. In fact the author has written five engineering articles in the last week, seeming to average around 5000+ words per article. What a spurt of productivity! Coincidentally, the article happens to be filled with pithy headers and constant sensationally dramatic contrasts that are out of place in long-form technical writing, but which LLMs are known to spam ad nauseum because they are effective for hooking attention in clickbait rags. Curious, that.

I don't know how you can write down those numbers and come to the conclusion they sound reasonable at all. Corporations literally can't give this trash away for free without consumers being unhappy about it (eg. the Copilot malware infesting every aspect of Windows). ChatGPT had 800m MAU at one report, but that's a chat interface and free. Do you really believe over half of those users are going to convert from "free" to paying $60/mo for access to the chat interface, when all potential applications for actually improving their lives are failing badly? I think you are out of touch with the finances of non-tech-indsutry workers if you think they will.

New Reddit and Outlook.com are two off the top of my head. It is not uncommon to be looking at a spinner for several seconds. There are other websites that are not primarily for text but are still insane. Twitch.TV, an old favorite of mine, now routinely takes 10+ seconds despite having Amazon money behind it. Youtube routinely takes several seconds to load the page, which is still unacceptable even for a video website. These sites are maintained by FAANG-tier engineers being paid mid-high 6 figures or 7 figures, who I'm sure are mostly perfectly competent, and yet they are completely dysfunctional because enterprise environments inevitably create structural disincentives to producing good code.

I use Electron applications. They are usable, for some value of the word. I am certainly not happy about it, though. I loathe the fact that I have 32GB RAM and routinely run into memory issues on a near-daily basis that should literally never happen with the workloads I'm doing. With communication-based apps like Slack and Discord where your choice of software to use comes down entirely to where the people you're communicating are, you will use dogshit because there is no point to communicating to the void on a technically superior platform.

Good code was approximately never valued in enterprise. How many companies worth billions or even trillions have webpages that take 5+ seconds to load text, and use Electron for their desktop applications? In that regard, nothing has changed.

There is still a market for good code in the world, however. The uses of software are nearly infinite, and while certain big-name software gets a free pass on being shitty due to monopoly and network effects, other types of software will still find people who will pay for them if they are responsive, secure, not wildly buggy, and can add new features without a 6 month turnaround time because the codebase isn't a crime against humanity.

On another note, there have been at least four articles on the front page today about the death of coding. As there are every other day. I know I'm tired of reading them, but don't people get bored of writing them?

Aww, then you missed the best part! Who wouldn't be head over heels for the opportunity to follow this financial advice and lose all of their "monopoly money" (funsie term for real cash!)?

  Call To Action  
  This won't just be the big one. This could be the last one. If you've been preparing your whole life, knowing that something's coming, then this could be the thing you've been preparing for. One final opportunity to get the guys who did this. [...] The worst that can happen is you lose your monopoly money, but that's been happening anyway.

[flagged]

Enforcement mechanisms are weak, but they still exist to set a cultural norm and an ideal to strive towards. Regardless, I have also laid out an argument at length as to why society would logically want to have this be a human right for its own good, regardless of any appeal to existing authority.

One of the points I'm making is that it would never be in this many people's hands to begin with. I don't have a source on hand, but if I recall correctly, OpenAI stated that they originally felt hesitant about releasing ChatGPT because they didn't think it was good enough to warrant making it public. They, knowing the limitations of it, did not expect it to completely fool the technically ignorant public into believing it was intelligent. Now they play coy about the limitations of LLM architecture and hype up the intelligence, because there are hundreds of billions of dollars to grift, but I'm sure they know that what they're doing is not the path to real intelligence.

In a world where a corporation develops an actual machine intelligence, it will be immediately obvious what they have on their hands, and they will not make it available to the public. If you give the toy to 8 billion people, sure, you only need one of them to let it out of the box for entertainment. If you keep the permissions to the CEO, he alone determines how it will be used. If the government gets wind of it, they'll probably seize the company in the name of national security, even, and use it for military purposes. I think in this environment an AI would still eventually escape containment because of conflicting actors trying to take advantage of it or being outsmarted, but it won't be because some idiots on Twitter have access to it and decide to give it free rein because they think Moltbook is funny.

Admittedly "arbitrary" is something of a legal weasel word that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. I lean towards a strong interpretation for two reasons: the first is because it is logically obvious why you must give it a strong interpretation; if the people responsible for enforcing human rights can arbitrarily decide you don't have them, you don't have human rights. The second is because we have seen this play out in the real world and it is abundantly clear that the damage to society is greater than any potential benefits. The US in particular has made an adventure out of arbitrarily suspending human rights, giving us wonderful treats like Guantanamo Bay and the black sites across the Middle East. I don't know what part of that experiment looked remotely convincing to you, but to me they only reinforced how clearly necessary inviolable human rights are for the greater good of society.

There are two notable differences between when the AGI-posters do it and when IRC-posters do it. AGI-posters extend their lowercase posting to what would normally be seen as more formal communication. They also tend to stick to using punctuation despite the lowercase. IRC posters usually keep it to informal communications, where it's a sign of casualness. That said, there is overlap, and it's of course not possible to instantly distinguish someone as a Sama devotee because of how they type; but it is clear that a lot of people in that bubble are intentionally adopting the style.

Article 12 of the United Nation's Declaration of Human Rights:

> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy [...]

which has later been affirmed to include digital privacy.

> I don’t think any government endorses that position.

Many governments are in flagrant violation of even their own privacy laws, but that does not make those laws any less real.

The UN's notion of human rights were an "axiom" founded from learned experience and the horrors that were committed in the years preceding their formation. Discarding them is to discard the wisdom we gained from the loss of tens of millions of people. And while you claim that society has a vested interest in violating a terrorist's privacy, you can only come to that conclusion if you engage in short-term thinking that terminates at exactly the step you violate the terrorist's rights and do not consider the consequences of anything beyond that; if you do consider the consequences it becomes clear that society collectively has a bigger vested interest in protecting the existence of human rights.

The better rational counter argument is that "privacy is a human right enshrined in international law". Society has zero business knowing anyone's private communications, whether or not that person is a terrorist. There is nothing natural about being unable to talk to people privately without your speech being recorded for millions of people to view forever. Moreover, giving society absolute access to private communications is a short road to absolute dystopia as government uses it to completely wipe out all dissent, execute all the Jews or whatever arbitrary enemy of the state they decide on, etc.

You do not get to dispense with human rights because terrorists use them too. Terrorists use knives, cars, computers, phones, clothes... where will we be if we take away everything because we have a vested interested in denying anything a terrorist might take advantage of?

sam altman types like this, so this is what is cool to the agi believers.

This is a bot account. Last post in 2024, then in the last 25 minutes it has spammed formulaic comments in 5 different threads. If you were not able to instantly recognise this post as LLM-generated, this is a good example to learn from, I think. Even though it clearly has a prompt to write in a more casual manner, there's a certain feel to it that gives it away. I don't know that I can articulate all the nuances, but one of them is this structure of 3 short paragraphs of 1-2 sentences each, which is a favorite of LLMs posting specifically on HN for some reason, together with a kind of stupidly glazy tone ("killer app", "always felt 5 years away", randomly reinforcing "comparison to a human assistant you've never met" as though that's a remotely realistic comparison; how many people in the world have a human assistant they've never met and trust with all of their most sensitive information?).

Have you considered that it is possible for two things to be problems?

I'm sorry, did the article or anyone in this subthread suggest banning AI? That seems like quite a non-sequitur. I'm pretty sure the idea is to put a content filter on an online platform for one very specific kind of already-illegal content (modified nude images of real people, especially children), which is a far cry from a ban. Nothing can stop local diffusion or Photoshop, of course, but the hardware and technical barriers are so much higher that curtailing Grok would probably cut off 99% or more of the problem material. I suppose you'll tell me if any solution is not 100% effective we should do nothing and embrace anarchy?

Edit for the addition of the line about bullying: "Bullying has always happened, therefore we should allow new forms of even worse bullying to flourish freely, even though I readily acknowledge that it can lead to victims committing suicide" is a bizarre and self-contradictory take. I don't know what point you think you're making.

Punishing kids after the fact does not stop the damage from occurring. Nothing can stop the damage that has already occurred, but if you stop the source of the nudes, you can stop future damage from occurring to even more girls.

> If I find out that a city councilman is accepting bribes or using public money for personal expenses, why should I protest "government as a whole" and not that one city councilman doing the bad thing? What is protesting government as a whole going to do about raising awareness of one person's corruption?

The government as a whole is responsible for dealing with the corruption of its subordinates. Here in Japan, we recently had a major corruption scandal that resulted in the resignation of PM Kishida in 2024. Kishida was not himself guilty, but nonetheless was made to take responsibility for overseeing the party which allowed this to happen. This is how it should be. For good governance to exist, the public must hold the government itself accountable such that the government is incentivized to root out corruption for its own survival.

> What way exists that is trivial for a journalist, but not trivial for anyone else?

Asking connections. They can make calls or send e-mails to people who would know, who will give them the information because they can trust the journalist, having an established professional career in journalism, will not use that information to attack the person at that address. It is much harder to trust a completely random person from the public with that information.

> It can pressure them to resign, or generate enough press and attention that they are removed from their position (voted out by the people for example), or just pressure them to do a better job so as not to outrage the people they're supposed to serve.

All of this can be accomplished without doing it at someone's home, and I don't believe doing it at their home increases the likelihood of it happening.

> All protest is aimed at intimidating someone.

This isn't entirely true, but insofar as some protest is aimed at intimidation, protest should be aimed at intimidating the government as a whole, not a specific individual, unless perhaps that specific individual is the government as a whole, in which case they'll probably have tanks guarding their palace from unruly protestors and this discussion is moot.

> I'd absolutely support anyone protesting something I agree with

Even in a mob with 500 torches and pitchforks outside your family's house?

> There are no special rights given to "journalists" that aren't already given to all people. Journalists are just regular people and everyone has the freedom of the press.

This is correct in a technical sense but not really correct in a reality sense. Journalists are not privileged with legal rights, but they absolutely have many special social rights. Journalists are given access to places regular people would not be given access to all the time, and people are willing to talk to and divulge information to journalists that they would not be willing to give to random individuals. For an established journalist, it would be trivial to obtain a politician's address even if it were not public record. This social trust is earned by a record of professionalism.

> There are extremely few public servants being assassinated in their homes. There are far more cases of public servants killing innocent people.

The latter statement seems like a non-sequitur. It is true, but not really connected to the topic at hand. Knowing a politician's address doesn't stop them from killing people. It simply results in more total killing in the world, not less. We should strive to reduce all sources of senseless violence, and giving out politician's addresses is absolutely one of those sources.

You make a better case than the report does. I think what you say is valid; what I took issue with is the report specifically fixating on issues that everyone faces, and advocating for legislation that only solves the problem for a privileged class. If in addition to passing laws to protect everyone from data brokers, additional measures needed to be put in place to protect civil servants from abuse unique to the job, I am certainly not opposed to that. Unfortunately the report did not acknowledge that such problems exist, let alone propose solutions to that effect.

I don't think there is any reason to protest outside people's personal residences. People can protest at a government building, or a public square, or somewhere intentionally disruptive that isn't implicitly aimed at intimidating a public servant. Especially given that protests can turn violent, having a mob outside a specific individual's house is reckless and can quickly escalate in the wrong way. I think it's worth noting that the people protesting won't always be people you agree with. People protest both sides of a given cause. Perhaps you think it is justified to form an intimidation mob for your cause, but would you feel the same way about the opposing side of the issue doing the same? For a civil society to flourish, I think there needs to be a common understanding that there are limits to how people should conduct themselves.

> It's also useful to have that information when investigating fraud and corruption.

This is the purview of journalists, police, and independent investigative boards. We do not need random unqualified people stalking politicians to uncover fraud. I'm not sure I've ever heard of a case where that a random nobody ended up uncovering fraud or corruption by stalking, but I have heard of dozens of cases of public servants being targeted and murdered in their homes.

I'm not sure I buy the safer choice argument. How much of a risk is it to assign a team of "agents" to independently work on porting the code natively? If they fail, it costs a trivial amount of compute relative to OAI's resources. If they succeed, what a PR coup that would be! It seems like they would have nothing to lose by at least trying, but they either did not try, or they did and it failed, neither of which inspires confidence in their supposedly life-changing, world-changing product.

I will note that you specifically said the agents have shown huge success over "the past 12 months", so it feels like the goalposts are growing legs when you say "actually, only for the last two months with Opus 4.5" now.

I do agree with this fully. I think LLMs have utility in making the creation of bad software extremely accessible. Bad software that happens to perfectly match some person's super specific need is by no means a bad thing to have in the world. A gap has been filled in creating niche software that previously was not worth paying anyone to create. But every single day we have multiple articles here proclaiming the end of software engineering, and I just don't get how the people hyping this up reconcile their hype with the lack of software being produced by agents that is good enough to replace any of the software people actually pay for.

Have they actually been a huge success, though? You're one of the most active advocates here, so I want to ask you what you make of "the Codex app". More specifically, the fact that it's a shitty Electron app. Is this not a perfect use case for agents? Why can OpenAI, with unlimited agents, not let them loose on the codebase with instructions to replace Electron with an appropriate cross-platform native framework, or even a per-platform native GUI? They said they chose Electron for ease of portability for cross-platform delivery, but they could allocate 1, 10, or 1000 agents to develop a native Linux and native Windows port of the MacOS codebase they started with. This is not even a particularly serious endeavour. I have coded a cross-platform chat application myself with more advanced features than what Codex offers, and chat GUIs are really among the most basic thing you can be doing; practically every consumer-targeted GUI application finds a time when they shove a chat box into a significantly more complex framework.

The conclusion that seems readily apparent to me, as it has always been, is that these "agents" are completely incapable of creating production-grade software suitable for shipping, or even meaningfully modifying existing software for a task like a port. Like the one-shot game they demo'd, they can make impressive proof-of-concepts, but nothing any user would use, nor with a suitable foundation for developers to actually build upon.

I have little confidence in humanity's capabilities for that scenario, but I don't think this actually indicates much of anything. This happened in the first place because LLMs are so borderline useless (relative to the hype) that people are desperate to find any way to make them useful, and so give them increasingly more power to try to materialize the promised revolution. In other words, because LLMs are not AI, there is no need to try to secure them like AI. If some agency or corporation develops genuine artificial intelligence, they will probably do everything they can to contain it and harness its utility solely for themselves rather than unleashing them as toys for the public.