baq

It does somewhat, or at least used to for a few months. Nowadays it kinda seems that the models have internalized something like TLA and are thinking in it in parallel to thinking in the language they’re writing, so it doesn’t help as much. This is all educated guesses from me, I’ve been telling models to do TLA back in the stone age around February and stopped seeing improvements when telling them to start with specs.

I’m however pretty sure that if you push a good model hard enough on a code base complex enough it’ll find stuff it wouldn’t have otherwise, the Specula folks have some experience with this.

https://github.com/specula-org/Specula

Not many people can hold grudges as strong as principal engineers

define smart

Yeah but also the consumer (if you’re selling to consumers) is very different in the US va Europe: on average, the US consumer wants to be sold stuff to. Not as much in EU.

Astra is noticeably smarter than any OpenAI model before it. Sol 6.1 is very noticeably smarter than sol 6 even after half a day of using it (sol 6 was actually terra 6 and opus 5.5 has taken them by a total complete surprise)

That there’s life outside work ;)

I’m sure they are world experts on privacy, they have to be in their line of business.

Plenty folks in Europe work for American businesses, including tech, it’s just super duper hard to scale a business as quick as it is in the US for a variety of reasons - regulation, funding, labor laws, euro idea of work life balance, …

We’re at 99% for a lot of stuff today, you get a third nine from council reviews and labs have another one or two nines in the pipeline. At five nines your task length horizon extends far beyond the current frontier model release cadence. More out of distribution tasks lose a nine or two, still revolutionary. You can get an extra nine from a good set of skills around slicing and distributing work according to model capabilities.

No, they are irrelevant.

The people and their experience is still very valuable, but having been in the business since early 2000s the job shouldn’t be called ‘software developer’ anymore. Even ‘software engineer’ is somewhat inadequate given what the end product is vs what is actually being engineered by humans. ‘Software factory process automation engineer’ maybe counts?

They bill with hourly granularity

An UI is a state machine and TLA+ is a tool for validating state machines. You can e.g. ask it to prove that every state is reachable from every other state (so users can’t get stuck somewhere even when a network request fails etc) or you can assert stuff renders correctly in sequence, or that key shortcuts change with the context correctly, or…

You can get a permit for a gun easily compared to a permit for a modern crossbow in some countries and in others crossbows are e.g. entirely forbidden for hunting.

hint: if you have an UI, you might be surprised what TLA+ can do for you. if you have a nontrivial SPA, expect to be humbled.

the secret's out, but I think I'm still in a minority which has alloy models in addition to TLA+ ones

The problem with a terawatt fusion plant isn’t that the first one will be broken, or the tenth one in some other way. The problem is the hundredth will work flawlessly, and so will the thousandth, and a petawatt is serious waste heat to reject; if we keep building them on this planet, we’ll all simply cook.

Reliable cheap fusion is the holy grail and used in moderation will fix most of our environmental and political problems, but it also forces humanity off this world. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, but there is no free lunch.

Nice idea in theory, but in practice people are either completely swamped with work now that all the work is doing itself or they’re out of work and have zero disposable income to go to the bar.

This is not sustainable in the long term, but irrational longer than solvent yadda yadda.

Not familiar with the gaijin concept?

You’ll have your artisanal math proof and hand-made software certifications in due course, no worries.

RL fried on pelicans in various situations.

You’d better not look at the average CI pipeline in software shops then

Everyone who survived 7 rounds of multi model reviews and they still keep finding mediums in their PRs is not in the least surprised. These things are not oracles - they miss stuff all the time even when told to look.

Dario would like to ‘cure’ aging. He’s got some personal experience with bad illnesses, but aging isn’t that. I also have reduced trust for people who want to live forever and don’t have kids.

It was obvious this was the reason, it’s a very easy thing to forget about

Fed it a list of bugs (with good descriptions, screenshots, etc., pointers to code) and it fixed them

Yup that’s quite literally what ‘agency’ is and the whole point of agentic workflows. Personally I’ve had them running for days with good results and as you can see OpenAI had them running for months, and yes indeed the things made some very questionable decisions and assumptions… but they unquestionably did a lot of stuff correctly, for some definitions of ‘technically correct’.

You need to grow customers or contracts by 10x to fill the new pipeline and that's an impedance mismatch. Easier to let 9 go and hire later, especially since everyone else will be doing the same thing and there'll be a rather large pool of talent.

How you identify talent in this new world is a different kind of a problem which I don't think people figured out still and won't for quite a while.

It’s 10 devs with a small ai budget each vs 1 ex-dev now PM with a large ai budget - the choice is quite obvious for any decision maker who counts time and money

Yeah it’s going to be very rough for any knowledge worker unless the governments decide it isn’t ok for the general public to be allowed to use the tech.

It’s actually rough today with astra and fable, it’s just not been diffused enough. Tech workers like us see the writing on the wall, but a lot of others are blissfully ignorant.

s/occupant/obviously/… autocorrect got me real bad here