ericol

Both Player of Games and Use of Weapons are incredible good books.

I was actually surprised when I finished UoW regarding how different it was from PoG, while maintaining the quality (If not better, but PoG IS THAT GOOD anyway).

For the record, the series was recommended to be by Claude of all things, and it told me that Phlebas was not up to quality but I gave it a shot just for the sake of completeness of the series. Nop, not worth it.

It was book 3 precisely that held me down. It was too long, and kind of lost the pace of the previous 2 books.

It was too repetitive.

> people will soon *stop paying

Think you missed a word there.

Somebody somewhere here gave a list that had "consider Phlebas" in it.

That particular book bored me to death, but from the same author / series I recently read "Player of Games" and "Use of Weapons" and I can't recommend (both) enough.

Dungeon Crawler, I started the series recently but got bored mid 3rd book. It is quite more denser than the first 2, and it feels like never ending.

> Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks

I started The Culture series a while ago. I read both "The Player of Games" (amazing book), and "Use of Weapons". Also amazing, with a Memento-like storytelling that was also incredible. I did enjoy both books a lot for different reasons, I can't vouch for any over the other really.

I then moved to "Consider Phlebas" and honestly, got bored to death. So my recommendation is to go for these two as well.

I recently (This month, bought a recent "deluxe edition" of sorts [1]) re read Neuromancer, and then jumped to "Count Zero" but at some point got bored mid way with Gibson's endless descriptions of non things.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GGGZSNXQ

So we're back to clippy now, LLM powered.

Not sure if the same product. I think the one I used was Google Desktop.

I even hacked it for a company I was working for at the time: I installed it in a machine that had a lot of pdfs from some other client company of them.

I don't recall the exact details, but I did some sort of proxying between the Microsoft Web Server that came with NT? at the time and G Desktop, and then an entire team of first support agents had almost instant search across all those docs. Good times.

Yeah, I agree, but what I am challenging is the idea that creativity IS the moat.

If anything, there are several _moats_ with Creativity (Big C) being one of them.

I think the moat(s) is anything the models still are nowhere near performing on their own, OR, getting them to do that is seriously expensive.

I don't know about Astra, and have used Fable 5.1 only slightly (And burned 85% of my 5 hour quota in 1 prompt).

In my experience, LLMs are completely devoid of "thinking outside the box" capabilities. And I'm not talking about 6 thinking hats type of stuff, but slight of to the right field lateral thinking. Something a 6 year old does for fun when playing with their mates.

If this weren't so, we wouldn't have been through so many "<buzzword> engineering" in such a short amount of time.

OK, but what about a pelican in a bycicle.

It doesn't define one.

On other news, water wets.

> I often hear people use the words agent and model interchangeably

_what_ people. Would I hear one of my colleagues do this, I'll slap them across the face. With a 4 pounds salmon. Alive.

> to help us have more precise conversations.

What problem are you trying to solve. _Why_ you need more precise conversations. I mean, I understand what you aiming at. But is it really worth it to go nitpicking at people's mental models, is the gain worth it?

I had Fable bail on me because I used the word autopilot on a project. Changed to something unrelated, and off we went.

The problem is that they are not solving the problem they ought to be solving.

I don't want Shakespeare, I want Bob the builder.

Half of my work is telling claude how to behave. I'm pretty certain they have enough _data_ to realize people do the same thing time and time again.

Check this comment of mine for a better explanation of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413353

> You ever read a work of literature with such flowery language that right after you've read a paragraph, you pause and realize you have no clue what you actually read, only to read the paragraph maybe a second or third time and have your mind space out again and again on each successive attempt?

Any recent work by William Gibson matches the description.

The way I managed to get claude to stop doing this is telling it "This document is for you for later use, no need to over explain things or extra verbosity"

I'm not sure about the x, but the first thing that arises from that is, I feel like in my case it's way higher than 2.

The 2nd thing is, how do I measure that.

---

In my case, the details of my work (Kinda DevOps, kinda Senior Dev) makes it that having an LLM to do the heavy lifting allows me to do things not only faster, but better, and across domains I do not hold expertise on.

An example of the effect of LLMs in my daily work is that I'm in the middle of a PHP upgrade for a rather large legacy application, and the "heavy lifting" is really out of the scale, letting me concentrate on what really matters, while at the same time if I do keep "the harness" tight I'm certain the results are the correct ones. Also correcting course is just as cheap.

Not having to worry on the tooling on exchange has the incredible desirable result of my velocity being incomparable to what it was before.

Then we have the side effect of how easy to do transfer knowledge: Rather than telling the QA guy how to do the work specific for this task, I defined a set of files (.md documents, skills, an off-the-shelf customised MCP server) that assist QA into doing the work in a way that helps me do my job better and faster.

There's also a clear possibility that what I'm doing will expand to the rest of the team I am in, completely altering the way in which we approach development.

If we take 'x' as 'mileage', yours might vary. Mine has, and I'm baffled at the positive net results I AM getting.

Also, this what I do (coding?) is extremely fun again.

Being able to work close to the speed of thought is the best high.

Dude. Not even your blog post is clear enough. I had to right click one of the images and open it in another tab in order to be able to discern _anything_ on the image.

I don't think that works at all times; actually I think it only works when starting a conversation. In the middle, "Why ~did you~ while action as an export in Lisp <this happened>?" needs a certain level of mind gynmastics that is not worth it. I'd rather curse at it.

ok that cracked me. Could be worth of an update:

    I don't know what machine they were raging against, but I'm pretty sure it was an LLM

Nice read, but having your home page play music is incredible rude.

I don't need a computer to mimic a human. AT ALL

As a matter of fact, for the line of work I do (programming, devops, the works) being conscious about the fact that I am just getting an algorithm outputting text that is probabilistically related to the input I gave it would actually be healthy for me and my mental state.

I HATE having to say "you" when working with an LLM.

yo dawg

Assuming you mean uninstall, yeah I did the same because of that.

I wasn getting a constant panel from them regarding using the backup feature, that will just keep re appearing.

It was so bad I even moved to GBoard. Not the same, but I'm getting used to.

2 days ago there was another interesting article on the effects of AI in hiring[1]

I guess this one just compounds.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48620142

What is means is that now hiring is symmetrically broken.

Hiring has always been broken. May be not completely at the FAANG level, but below that, and more importantly across the globe it's seriously broken, and there's a high variance when it comes to hiring consultants quality.

The widespread use of AI vy applicants is very likely surfacing how comfortable consultants were doing the bare minimum when hiring.

Source: I've been working for 10+ years for a company that has an ATS for mostly European clients.

I know for a fact how crappy work around hiring is.

P.S.: the article focuses mostly on one direction of hiring. The opposite direction is also suffering from this (briefly explained in the article about AI fueled hiring bias). In my opinion, that is an even greater problem.

In the style of Benjamin Buford "Bubba" Blue:

"You got your cold brew, your Japanese iced coffee, your iced americano. Then there's your mazagran, that's coffee with lemon juice, real refreshing. Your espresso tonic. Your iced latte, iced cappuccino, iced macchiato. You got your iced mocha, your frappuccino, your Greek frappé. Vietnamese iced coffee with the condensed milk dripping down real slow. Affogato, that's espresso poured right over ice cream. That's... that's about it."

Wait until in 5 year's time all kids speak in rule of 3

> No headers per element. No pointers. No jumping around the heap.

that smells of AI [1], and thus lazy writing. I'm all in for using AI to help you write, but if you don't put your voice to it then there's no reason to read it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#...

I'm not excited about producing more, and all that jazz.

But, work IS exciting now - not sure for how long - because AI allows me to work almost at the speed of thought.

Nothing more, nothing less. It's FUN to be able to _just_ think.

I loved this show as a kid.

Growing up in Argentina, back in the day these were all dubbed. The version I watched on tv had a voice and personality of its own - Latin American "neutral" Spanish - and for the life of me I could never find that same version, only the Spain-dubbed one.