cryptoz

The plan: You are a PM and Engineer - and so is the AI. You both write tickets and you both complete them to iterate on your code.

https://codeplusequalsai.com

You can build webapps very quickly, especially AI-enabled ones, and deploy them on a subdomain. Other users can sign up and use your webapp, and any tokens they use will be billed to them and you will get a large cut (80%) of the margin earned on the tokens billed - as I bill 2x OpenAI API token costs to create this margin.

So ideally you can validate your idea by rapidly building a prototype and evening earning revenue to boot.

DeepMind’s original demos were also of Atari gameplay.

I don’t think the expression is positive or negative. It just means we can’t go back. I guess that could be positive or negative case by case depending on how you feel about going back or not.

The confetti is out of the canon.

I hope it's not just another orb that talks to you. Maybe they're making humanoids, that's all the rage now... I do wonder what they have built! Surely something right?

The actual money can’t be the issue. It’s $136 for failure to stop at a stop sign in WA. If they enforced that for 30 seconds per day the cities would be wealthy beyond belief.

Or maybe not-but we’d have much safer traffic! Thus enabling revenue from fewer deaths.

But I digress- the problem with “revenue” for cities is they actively avoid getting it. If they actually wanted or desired more funds for the city, simply enforcing laws is all that is needed. It’s just not desired to have revenue I suppose, if it means enforcing laws and collecting dues owed.

Yes yes I’m probably being “unrealistic” but honestly? Maybe not.

Thanks! And yeah, it really is satisfying watching the tickets move from column to column "all on their own" as the works gets done!

Yup - honestly the space is so open right now still, everyone is trying haha. It's got quite hard to keep track of different models and their strengths / weaknesses, much less the IDE and editor space! I have no idea which of these AI editors would suite me best and a new one comes out like every day.

I'm still in vim with copilot and know I'm missing out. Anyway I'm also adding to the problem as I've got my own too (don't we all?!), at https://codeplusequalsai.com. Coded in vim 'cause I can't decide on an editor!

Thanks and yeah that is a concern; however I have been getting quite good results from this AST approach, at least for building medium-complexity webapps. On the other hand though, this wasn't always true...the only OpenAI model that really works well is o3 series. Older models do write AST code but fail to do a good job because of the exact issue you mention, I suspect!

This exact problem is something I’m hoping to fix with a tool that parses the source to AST and then has the LLM write code to modify the AST (which you then run to get your changes) rather than output code directly.

I’ve started in a narrow niche of python/flask webapps and constrained to that stack for now, but if you’re interested I’ve just opened it for signups: https://codeplusequalsai.com

Would love feedback! Especially if you see promising results in not getting huge refactors out of small change requests!

(Edit: I also blogged about how the AST idea works in case you're just that curious: https://codeplusequalsai.com/static/blog/prompting_llms_to_m...)

I mean, for normal people that is exactly how it’s being used. Your receipts for everything are automatically emailed with all kinds of private info for example. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is expecting those receipts to be public. And since all that is in your email you reasonably expect your other email to be private as well.

Email is auth now. People do not use email the way you are describing.

Oh, is Bourbon still supported? Most likely simpleton jokes are still unsupported on HN however.

I’m also reminded of the experiment that Facebook ran on its users to try to make them depressed. Modifying the news feed algorithm in a controlled way to figure out if they could make users fall into a depression or not.

Not disclosed to those users of course! But for anybody out there that thinks corporations are not actively trying to manipulate your emotions and mental health in a way that would benefit the corporation but not you - there’s the proof!

They don’t care about you, in fact sometimes big social media corporations will try really hard to target you specifically to make you feel sad.

Oh, that kind of habit. The good kind. It can take much less than 1 day to form a bad habit. I wonder how that asymmetry really is - were ancient humans less exposed to addictive substances and had no need to evolve a way to stop that? I have no idea what I'm talking about so, I'll end the comment here.

I suppose I wanted more from this post than I got. But on the other hand, nobody really knows the future of work yet so it'd all be speculation anyway.

I think I have a pretty good vague idea though; it'll be collaborative between humans and AI. We'll do different things on our computers and I hope, maybe even use our brains more in planning, architecture, etc, be it code or otherwise.

Humans like being in control and (often) don't like the dirty details of real work - although I recognize the HN crowd is an exception and does in fact love the dirty details of getting work done. But globally, outside of software especially, I think we'll want to move details to the AI (as scary as that sounds) and have higher-level management tasks for humans. Not just code review, but yes, code review too.

Very fascinating changes here. Did Apple do this recently without announcing or documenting it? Controversy! Whose phone is it? And who's to say I'm not using it if it is sitting there for 3 days? Maybe I am using it! You don't know!

I wonder how many home projects this will muck up, like Androids as security camera or weather data collectors or other things.

And is this update going out to all Android devices, no choice about it, all versions? That's kinda wild.

This reminds of Google Paper in 2007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_April_Fools%27_... I know at least 2 people who were fooled by it haha.

And important.

Another example is the IRS Employer ID site; only open during business hours. Frustrating when you go there on Saturday and get hyped to found your company, but I guess waiting 2 days to get an EID wasn't a big deal in retrospect.

Appreciate you having a look and for that feedback, thanks - I do agree I have work to do to prove that my idea is better than alternatives. We'll see...

I support HTML, JS, Python and CSS. For HTML, (not technically an AST), I give the LLM the original-file HTML source, and then I instruct it to write python code that uses BeautifulSoup to modify the HTML. Then I get the string back from python of the full HTML file, modified according to the user prompt.

For python changes I use ast and astor packages, for JS I use esprima/escodegen/estraverse, and for CSS I use postcss. The process is the same for each one: I give the original input souce file, and I instruct the LLM to parse the file into AST form and then write code that modifies that AST.

I blogged about it here if you want more details! https://codeplusequalsai.com/static/blog/prompting_llms_to_m...

This is refreshing to read. I, like everyone apparently, am working on my own coding agent [1]. And I suppose it's not that capable yet. But it sure is getting more reliable. I have it only modify 1 file at a time. It generates tickets for itself to complete - but never enough tickets to really get all the work done. The tickets it does generate, however, it often can complete (at least, in simple cases haha). The file modification is done through parsing ASTs and modifying those, so the AI doesn't go off and do all kinds of things to your whole codebase.

And I'm so sick of everything trying for 100% automation and failing. There's a place for the human in the loop, in quickly identifying bugs the AI doesn't have the context for, or large-scale vision, or security or product-focused mindset, etc.

It's going to be AI and humans collaborating. The solutions that figure that out the best are going to win IMO. AI won't be doing everything and humans won't be doing it all either. The tools with the best human-AI collaboration are where it's at.

[1] https://codeplusequalsai.com

Reminds me of that time in Russia at the chess tournament, where they repurposed some industrial robot to play chess and it crushed a kid’s hand.

Also reminds me of when Uber got kicked out of California to test self driving cars, so they moved to Nevada and promptly killed a woman.

I guess it’s not surprising that safety is taking a back seat in robotics development everywhere in the world. It’s a mad race for profits of untold scale. But it would be so great if the companies that win would be the companies that don’t fumble on human safety, taking perhaps a slower approach but one that kills/maims fewer people.

One of the coolest things ever is you can see the shadows and depths of the craters on the moon from here on Earth, with a cheap ~$15 telescope or probably binoculars too. I remember buying the galileoscope for $15 many years ago and was absolutely shocked how cool the moon looked, and how 3D.

Pro-tip: the full moon isn't so fun to look at, you want some level of crescent moon so you can avoid getting overloaded on the brightness.

(You can also stay up for a few hours and actually observe Io revolving around Jupiter, I think it takes most of the night to get 1/4 of the way around. Pretty obvious revolutions when you keep observing throughout the night.)

Remarkably consistent downward trend for Android :(

Seems like a use case for AI right here; just have the user 'talk' silently, mouthing the words or in a very quiet whisper. I assume AI can read lips pretty well by now right? So turn on your video, have the AI already know how to synthesize your voice, and then just careful mouth the words into the camera. An AI model should be able to live-synthesize your voice that matches what you want to say and I think there would be minimal latency, not any worse than other video conferencing latency. And with headphones on, nobody on the plane can hear the other side, or you. And you could get a live transcript visible to you as well, so you could know if the AI made a mistake in reading your lips and you could correct it.

Might look weird but shrug.

That’s not the definition of legalese and I protest the focus of the article and study: that center embedding is seemingly the sole issue.

I think they are, though, just not consciously. I’m finding more and more it is rare that I find myself typing on a device and there isn’t some AI lurking in it. Email, docs, mobile keyboards, soon to be also Apple intelligence searching your photos, etc.

I can’t even type a note to myself in gmail without “polish!” Popping in to tell me that I’m shit at writing a good note-to-self and it needs polishing. (Wherein it typically reforms to , “dear customer service, …”)

Every Google search is using llm now right? At least I can’t figure out how to stop it from happening.

Early Android dev had a guide on how devs could pick the best location from various sources individually, and it was massive pain with dubious results.

As someone who has added hundreds of DNS records, there is absolutely nothing “just” about it.

At 1:50, the guy gives the robot a glass to pick up and then immediately nopes out of there. Wonder if previous demos resulted in a broken glass haha.

Also at 2:08 the upside-down container gets flipped quickly. I wonder if that was a known limitation of the robot at the time or if the person just had a desire to flip it right-side up (to be polite? haha).

I'm commenting on these tiny details and laughing a lot because I'm not sure I can handle a more serious approach to this. Doesn't it seem like in < 10 years there will be dozens of autonomous, affordable home-robots? Everything is going to change.

One last note, they call this generalist, but each of the examples is quite specific from a macro perspective. Yes the robot can fold maybe any pile of crumpled laundry now and that is generalist compared to previous efforts, but seems like we shouldn't be trying to train bots how to do billions of tasks in specific detail; rather they should learn to learn and take on new tasks they weren't trained for.