disgruntledphd2

And hands.

> Drug discovery is similar AFAIK. The space of possibilities is even larger than protein folding, but it's structurally similar enough that I think AI will help to make progress on the discovery side.

I do agree that this kind of targeted approach makes sense.

However, discovery is not really the issue here. Running the clinical trials (1/2/3) is much much more difficult, and consumes basically all of the time in drug development, so even if LLMs perfectly automate this, the speedup will not be particularly large.

Yeah, it's particularly common when the EU does stuff.

> I mean they did solve the protein folding problem did they?

They made huge progress, but I would say that the vast majority of work on this problem was designing the harness for the model. That's a lot of work for each and every domain.

> Curing cancer sounds insane, but it's also a research problem,

I just don't buy the AI labs approach to this stuff. Like, unless we can basically simulate the entirety of human biology, I don't really see how LLMs can make progress here. Maths is different as it doesn't require a real-world interface, and programming already (by definition) can be simulated on a computer.

Without that, I can't see much (if any) progress being made on domains like biology.

This also happened in 2018, but yeah it's crazy.

Ireland took in an incredibly large number of Ukraine refugees per capita.

The alumina thing is pretty bad, and reflective of Irish peoples relatively confused understanding of geopolitics.

Now do the Greeks ;) one of the big problems with the EU is that it's a collection of national governments who have their own interests. Given that, they've done incredibly well on the Russian stuff.

And btw, Ireland does not have either Russian nor cheap gas.

Crash means zero reward, so yeah.

I mean to be fair to him, he's built an innovative car company, a pretty rocking space company, and now controls access to basically all government officials and politicians (X).

He's definitely super successful and not a complete conman.

Then again, he's kinda a conman because he's promised absolutely absurd things that haven't happened.

He's a complicated character, 13 years ago I thought he was great, and now I mostly think he's a douchebag. insert complicated shrug emoji.

For me, at least it's that the newer Claude models seem optimised for one-shotting things, which is not what I want. As the amount of code per turn increases, I have a harder job keeping up and ensuring that it's doing what I want.

That being said, I had to nope out of a similar thing from GPT 5.6 today, so it appears to be a US frontier lab issue. Claude is particularly bad though, as it produces far too much code even when I tell it not to, unlike GPT (and Kimi) which at least listen to me a little better.

More generally, I want a usable human review experience, and Claude code doesn't deliver that for me.

Yeah, I actually have started using GPT Sol much much more, as Claude (all of them) were far too trigger happy around making changes, and refused to listen to my requests to take things slowly.

Feels like they've overtrained on one-shotting (which does demo well, and presumably converts new subscribers), whereas I want a model to do work for me in small, easily understood changes that I can hold in my head (maybe I'm not smart enough for Claude 4.7+).

> I would avoid phrasing it as "better". Less wealthy parents are likely working more hours, have to spend more time on household maintenance (don't have a cleaner, can't afford grocery delivery), not to mention the overwhelming stress of struggling to make ends meet. It's not exactly a level playing field.

Sure, and all of that was included in my comment. It's definitely not a judgement of parents, I am one and it's incredibly difficult even with our relatively high incomes.

Mine told me that this always happens, so I schedule my appointments appropriately.

> The benefit richer students have is that, on average, their parents are smarter, more conscientious, etc.

Yup. In general the benefit of schools in richer areas is better parents, rather than better schooling itself.

Depressing, but true.

> The doctor would give appointment times that assumed he'd spend 15 minutes per patients but he was friendly and patient with answering questions so he'd always end up being very late by the time evening came.

I have a doctor like this, and it's totally worth the wait as she actually listens to people and provides useful information. I do generally try to get a morning appointment with her though, as otherwise it can take a loooooonnnnngggg time.

> That's magnesium deficiency. Promise.

I find that incredibly hard to believe (although my doctor did mention that magnesium supplements were worth taking).

Can you point me to some research that support this claim please?

I don't really, but at least there would be standards. Like, the massive amount of hacks and breaches we've seen in the past ten years indicate that something needs to happen.

> Once again the alternative is not nothing.

Can you help me understand what the alternative is?

> As I commented elsewhere - the problem then becomes who gets to define what the proper path is. For example destroying companies because they chose not to follow the latest sage advice from anyone who once signed the Agile Manifesto does not seem like a good way to promote better quality software to me. And yet it seems highly likely that those are the kinds of people who would initially be engaged as "experts" by those seeking to establish the regulatory environment.

This is why any such regulation is likely to end up in a much better state if it's driven by actual practitioners. However, given how many software people are wildly against this, it seems unlikely to happen and so we'll end up in the less good state you note above.

> I don't think it's diagnosis that helps people.

It might be the societal structure is good for everyone, regardless of their diagnoses, or lack thereof.

> They won't be impressed at all by someone's big title and even bigger budget while they're exercising that professional judgement either. Some of these people have had pretty stellar careers so I think it's safe to say their professional conduct hasn't damaged them with their employers or clients.

It really depends on the status of the profession in society and the company. I'd expect lots of software organisations to fire a bunch of people looking for people pleasers until this becomes an accepted part of the business approach.

> It’s similar to how lawyers and regulatory compliance rarely change the product. They change how the product is talked about and framed for the purpose of regulation.

This is true, and basically what tends to happen is that if the Head of some compliance function (e.g. internal audit) is causing problems for the business, then they are replaced with someone who won't cause such problems.

It's still better than nothing. Like, software basically runs our society now, so either software professionals get together on this, or regulations will be imposed on us, and they will be much worse than what we'd get in the first option.

> About occupational licensing for software: it's also a uniquely global market, so I'm not sure how any one economy moving ahead with occupational licensing would work, unless they also restricted what software you can import or use in the cloud.

Relatively easily, tbh. Just create a regulation that requires either the country's standards or equivalent ones to be used in the creation of any software sold to people/businesses in the country/region.

> most of intellegice is still coming from training data not from RL.

For coding specifically, I'm not sure this is still true. Given the heavy use of RL to improve coding performance, I'd expect the harness to be important as it defines what tools the model is rewarded for using.

> Your original argument appeared to imply that it was a system designed to separate people by class, not by merit or educational attainment.

I guess my core point is that those people you note (and I've met loads of them too) would have been equally smart and educated if they'd gone to a less prestigious university, but conditional on their ability, they'll do better at getting higher status jobs because they went to an Ivy League.

> In my experience the people who are that selective about university pedigree are either doing it out of laziness (outsourcing selection process to the university filtering mechanism)

This was a HR level policy at a really fast growing tech company (Facebook, back in 2013). I remember it because I was so shocked that this was a thing (not being an Ivy League graduate myself).

> I’ve known a lot of Ivy League graduates and they were all very smart. Most of them were very good people, too. A lot of them came from backgrounds that didn’t include wealth or social connections.

Again, the fact that entry to the class system can be meritocratic is entirely disconnected from the fact of it operating as a class system.

When I worked at Big tech I remember recruiters (US-based) talking about hiring from approved schools, which were mostly Ivy League.

Additionally, when we were hiring a candidate in Europe, our director wanted to know what school she had gone to. Fortunately, she was an Oxbridge graduate so all was well.

Again, even if all Ivy League graduates were in the top 1% of objective merit, the use of this credential in hiring/firing/other decisions is what makes it a class system.

I have worked with many Ivy League graduates and they were all super smart and mostly effective, but that doesn't change my point.

I would like to know all of these things too, hopefully the S-1 from either OpenAI or Anthropic will tell us more.

> I don't get all this existential talk about college acceptance. Yes, elite schools should expect elite applicants.

As a non-US person who's worked for a bunch of US companies, my belief is that the Ivy League et al act as a class system, rather than a symbol of educational attainment.

> No one my age can afford a stay at home wife

If you work in tech, this is possible. It's gonna suck, and you'll feel poor relative to your peers, but it's entirely possible.

> The most charitable way I can read those paragraphs is that he's vaguely alluding to a nebulous conspiracy by a cabal of elites, which evokes a specific ideology that cannot be discussed constructively.

If the markets/finance people reward you for saying you are all-in on AI, people with much of their compensation dependent on the markets (i.e. executives) will claim that AI is driving amazing results.

Like, I find AI useful in lots of places and use these tools daily, but I don't see how the pure play model companies can deliver a good return for their investors.

Unlike ed though, I do think that we'll find good uses for all the compute and (hopefully) the energy infrastructure being built out for this compute.