cvwright

The counterpoint to this is that early 20th century Germany was one of the most advanced, sophisticated, and educated countries in the world.

In fact the genocide only stopped when a bunch of unsophisticated American (and Russian) farmboys rolled in.

Yes the Chromebooks are pervasive and used in every subject. Probably because they are cheaper than buying overpriced textbooks for every subject.

I tried it last month after hearing here that it didn’t speak in Claudisms.

As a chatbot it’s totally fine, virtually indistinguishable from Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude.

For coding it’s… okay. I tried 4.6 and it feels similar to Opus from 12 months ago, or maybe Sonnet from 9 months ago. YMMV.

It’s curious how tariffs are always a bad move for the US, but always a good move for other countries.

I come from a lower class US background.

I assure you, take one look at us and you’ll instantly see that very few of us are in any danger of starving.

As you point out, a HS diploma is largely meaningless these days.

This discussion is about students trying to get into top colleges, which is a completely different population with completely different problems from those doing the bare minimum.

Where are these well engineered products made with care? I would love to use more tech like that.

Unfortunately most sites and apps have been low quality and getting worse since well before AI coding became a thing. Examples: Lowes, Home Depot, American Airlines - all shockingly bad for companies of that size.

We’ve already had those limits for years on any corporate project with average (or below) developers.

I work with a lot of AI code, and it’s not any worse than what big teams were already producing.

A small team of 2-3 really good humans is in a whole different league, but that has always been a very rare case.

We’re at the point where people who talk too fancy get accused of being LLMs, and the people who make human mistakes get scolded for grammar.

Sometimes I don’t need my todo app to be “great” or revolutionary in any way. I just need it to work, and bog standard average is perfectly fine for a lot of things.

This frees me up to spend more time at the design level, solving harder or more novel problems.

Sounds like a mini version of Habermas’s legitimation crisis playing out in real time

Don’t use deterministic encryption unless your data is already highly random.

Any adversary who knows the distribution of the plaintext data can guess what your encrypted values are, with accuracy that improves as your sample size increases.

There were a bunch of papers on this 10-12 years ago. (Full disclosure: I was an author on some of them.)

It was a big year for the culture war. People who had previously been cordial suddenly needed to fight each other over politics and other controversies of the day. The rest of us watched this happen, then slowly backed away.

You should try writing a design doc with the AI before you have it write the code. It will make random extrapolations from your first prompt, some good and some bad. Then you get a chance to argue back and forth with yourself with the robot as a helper.

The best early example of this is that Anthropic is already eating the lunch of all the new “AI security audit” companies. And they were only a few years old.

Those guys certainly thought they were being novel and creative, using AI to disrupt an expensive and labor intensive business model. But now with Claude Security, their own market share is going to be gobbled up before they can even get established.

Unfortunately even in the old days, a truly good programming book like you’re describing was depressingly rare.

Younger me really enjoyed some of the game programming books by Andre Lamothe.

Most “Learn Language X” books were terrible with over focus on syntax and very little thought into organization.

LLMs are bringing us back to all the “proper” software engineering stuff that we’ve always known we should be doing, but until now we never had enough time/people/money to do it right.

Brainstorming and research before writing a design.

Writing a design or spec before writing the code.

Comprehensive unit tests.

Etc etc etc.

Like you, I get vastly better output from the tool when I create a detailed spec in markdown before I let it start coding. And bonus, the LLM is pretty good at helping with the spec too.

You’re arguing that we have too many PhD students in CS, not too few.

I agree with you fwiw.

re: incentives, my proposal was always to let schools pay their football and basketball players, but require that grad research assistants are paid the same.

I worked a ton in grad school, and it definitely sucked at the time.

But it’s crazy to complain about getting paid to go to school. A grad stipend is there to minimally support you so you don’t have to get another job and can focus on your research. It’s not supposed to be a career!

Even that press release never claimed that Mythos was better than Opus at finding bugs.

They claim the huge advance is in exploiting the bugs.

The word “exploit” may be doing a lot of work here. In my experience Opus 4.6 is perfectly happy to provide test cases that trigger ASAN, even without the super secret squirrel security access.

But if you ask it to get you a shell it’ll probably tell you to get lost.

It’s been said that the British executed about 1% of their population each year for a few hundred years, and that a similar number died in prison.

The claim is that this made Britain a much safer country in later centuries.

New section, like pre-crime but for history. Pre-history.

And you don’t have to worry that some random passenger will piss, puke, or shit in the Waymo during your commute.

The first two happened to me within the span of a month during the three years that I rode Trimet in Portland.

Unless the data is a lagging indicator

Are Mississippi and Louisiana at the top of the pay scale?

Then why are their reading scores improving so dramatically compared to wealthier states? Especially for under-privileged populations?

Because the Brits will never be accepted by the locals as a Thai or Vietnamese or whatever, and they know it.

Whereas in western countries we have “new Germans” or “new British” from all over the world.

It’s easy to find sketchy lines of code in any large C project.

The big advance that they are claiming with Mythos is the ability to triage all the hundreds of candidate vulns and automatically generate exploits to prove that the real ones are real. And if they’re really finding 27-yr-old 0-days in OpenBSD, then it’s not just hype.

Right. It’s things like Baltimore (when I lived there) requiring that high speed internet had to roll out in poor areas first, before it could go into the rich neighborhoods.

But this was the early 2000s and the internet was still “new”. Only the richer areas cared and were willing to pay the price. Letting them have first (or even equal!) access would have made it easier to fund the rollout in low income areas.