bogzz

"Miscreants" conjures in my mind an image of little British boys with dirty feet in Industrial Revolution era attire.

You are right, it is tricky. But the assumption is that AGI is going to get here before employment becomes difficult to obtain. If AGI is here, then we have the problem you speak about. If not, then AI is a tool which enables workers to be more productive. If workers with this new tool are more productive to the point that employment across a broad spectrum of possible jobs is hit hard, then we need to talk about labor reform of the sort I spoke about. It would increase the amount of people needed in the workforce across the board.

I don't understand why people always spring for UBI. I don't want free money; I want to earn my living. I want to work.

Why do we not push for labor reform, as we did a century ago? Depending on the actual productivity gains from AI broadly, set a new standard of 4-hour workdays. Or 3-day work weeks.

I'm not discrediting them as being of no value, I am just discrediting the notion that devs who are unable to find work now should be beefing up their AI skills so that they can get a job in the future. "AI skills" as they are talked about are easier and quicker to pick up than working with a library, e.g. React. And if they are not difficult to learn, then they are not a differentiator nor should they be treated as such.

But I don't believe what you've said disproves my point. To me, it boils down to attitude, not so much aptitude when it comes to "AI skills" in this context. You even admitted that some of the solutions could be one-shotted by copying and pasting the problem.

As for building agents that perform work themselves, in my opinion it boils down to understanding the problem space, isolating the key business logic, and determining what the pertinent requirements are. Kinda sounds like looping back around to software engineering skills IMO.

Again though, these recommendations are so vacuous. If you already are a capable developer, then you can pick all of that up within a week. "Learn AI skills" is such a low effort reflexive response that I'd expect it from a non-technical executive, not from an HN commenter.

I'm not sure I could characterize the frontier labs as greedy, given that they've been consistently losing gargantuan amounts of money.

The people who give them the money are greedy, and hopefully in for a rude awakening. Starting from Nvidia's vendor financing which has a very direct benefit to them, through to every company and oligarch investing into data centres in the hopes of being one of the ones left capitalizing on capturing the livelihoods of the majority of what remains of the "middle class".

It's either hopium or a truly horrific dystopia. Something's going to have to give.

Also, nothing quite like the Black & White games has matched what the originals offered.

Ah, the familiar twinge of sorrow and rue at reading the name "Yugoslavia"...

Time will tell.

Zitron is far more negative when it comes to the utility of LLMs than I am, but dear God would it be satisfying to watch him be proven right on the financials.

His as-of-late frequent appearances on Bloomberg, CNBC, and Scott Galloway's podcast, as well as his collaborations with Ed Elson from Galloway's podcast must feel like a great vindication for him already. Quite impressive for a person who is self-taught in that area, just over the past two years.

edit: And, of course, the post is flagged. We must bury our heads in the sand again.

The GitHub failure unicorn image always brings me back to the good old days of trying out new Android ROMs. That unicorn used to be the logo of the Android Open Kang Project, which used to be my favorite ROM.

I wonder how it made it onto GitHub.

I love reading Glimmer's "thoughts". Why use many word when few do trick?

And this kind of thinking is part of the reason behind the hatred.

Isn't the comment in fact praising Derek Lowe as a science communicator? In the second paragraph OP is just posing the questions that one might have when reading about a field not your own, that highlight the importance of reliable science communicators.

For instance, Opus 5 yesterday critiqued my resume and mentioned a ridiculous little detail-- my phone number area code didn't match the state in which I currently work (I know, I should anonymize but I couldn't be bothered). It failed to notice that I both worked in (previously) and studied in the state of my area code. This was just two pages of text, set to highest effort.

Why would you want to replace your lawyer with a set of tensors that does not actually think and makes mistakes like this? Lawyers tend to get hired in high stakes situations. Why wouldn't you instead say that this would be a great tool for lawyers to use judiciously in researching precedents, etc?

I don't understand what people are doing with models that makes them assign agency or intelligence to them. When I manage to forget the financial fuckery of the AI buildout and its implications, when I manage to forget scaremongering by loathsome CEOs, I still have the same fascination and excitement at the idea of LLMs as I did when I was playing with the GPT API prior to the release of ChatGPT.

LLMs are, to me, truly amazing tech. It's so fascinating to me that they now DO have emergent properties that look at face value like reasoning and intelligence. But every day that I work with them, I am repeatedly clobbered over the head with the fact that they do NOT reason and are NOT intelligent.

Why can't we be fascinated by emergent properties of intelligence without immediately jumping 10 steps into the future and, like a limit in calculus, assume that "this is it-- we're on the cusp of AGI"? To me, the fact that LLMs can combine existing ideas that people hadn't thought of combining in solving a novel problem is extremely cool. But my first thought is-- this is an amazing new tool for mathematicians and researchers. Instead, most everyone seems to jump the gun to the "humans are obsolete next year" conclusion.

I thought so, but thanks for the clarification. I am a little bit disappointed that local autocompletion models have been left by the wayside in favor of models post-trained for agentic coding. Both Codestral and Qwen-2.5-coder are more than a year old at this point, but local auto-complete seems to me to be such a great usecase.

Oh, can it work with the /v1/completions/ auto-complete endpoint?

The article has no detail that might serve to explain her reasoning for leaving, but does note that she left after the HuggingFace hacking incident. The implication could be that model alignment is not being taken seriously, sure. But it could just as likely be that there was collusion between HuggingFace and OpenAI and that the incident was orchestrated as a publicity stunt.

I want to clarify that I am not doubting the cybersecurity capabilities of frontier models-- I have no reason to believe that the hack itself was not carried out by the model. But the companies' use of LARPing language in describing the incident, granting agency to the models in their phrasing definitely does raise suspicion on my end, particularly in light of their track record of releasing models which have been 'too dangerous to release' for years now.

I finally got the downvote powers yesterday, and I was irrationally pleased about that.

It's not even about votes, I don't even need votes. Whenever I write something that I am happy with, I read and reread it imagining I am reading it as a third person. Sometimes it forces me to rework my arguments. I wouldn't write to convey my ideas through a chatbot. And that's what this post is about-- killing the internet and with it decimating any audience you might have accrued if you had something to say and you published it on a website.

I've been using duckduckgo exclusively for two weeks now, and I haven't needed to go back to Google even once yet.

Oh, I'm aware. I am just still dealing with the whiplash from our profession transitioning in an instant from one of the most enviable to the first on the chopping block. And the banality of it all is appalling.

The magnitude of the proposed (and in progress) AI compute buildout only makes sense if LLMs actually are a path to AGI, in which case autonomous agents will be doing most of the white collar work and siphoning money that would otherwise enable a "middle class" to work, live, and flourish-- to the LLM labs, hyperscalers, and hardware companies.

I do not believe this to be the case; model improvements to me do not appear to converge towards that outcome. But at this point normal behavior from these entities would be perceived as a bearish signal I suppose, and so the show must go on.

I definitely resent how this state of affairs has made me feel derision towards so much in this field that I used to love.

Or mayhaps he overspent lately in the pursuit of AI that MIGHT replace workers, like everyone else.

I solved a Leetcode Medium on my first try in about 10 minutes the other day and it felt so amazing. Thinking through architecture, project composition, composability, etc when working with agents felt fine for a while but it made me feel disconnected from what I'm actually building.

Actually engaging my brain to solve the lower-level, on-the-ground code allows me to think of better ways to do things while I'm writing them. It's like writing anything. You start with something you want to convey, a thesis, and then it evolves and becomes better as you write it. An agent will just write it with no thought, as in it will reflect one of the LLM 'ghosts' as Andrej Karpathy puts it, doing something in the same way that someone in the training data has done it on a similar or different problem. This is why I get conniptions now when I am sent generated text or am expected to read it on a public forum. It's disrespectful of the time of every person expected to read it.

That said, I wouldn't like to go back to the before times without having the agentic option available. Ideally, businesses should not mandate how LLM's are to be used at their company, and just let the devs find their own flow. That is, if quality is even a factor that any company optimizes for anymore.

I keep seeing this argument, but there is nothing preventing anyone from purchasing a "dumb" phone. How would you envision multiplying your productivity in the day-to-day with a voice interface?

I'm talking about the Google app on every Android with gapps on it. It used to be able to do this for you, and now it just does web search. It's a massive downgrade.

It's gonna be yuge.

It will probably be pretty.