excentricus

I don’t know what principles this kind of thinking falls under, but one useful approach is to know clearly what you’re trying to do, achieve, or understand. Know your assumptions and be honest about them, acknowledge that they can fail and challenge them when they carry critical weight in your reasoning, and keep peeling back those assumptions until you reach a point where their correctness rests on obviously reasonable facts or axioms that you no longer need to unpack.

Also, in my limited personal experience so far, the people who relentlessly talk about and evangelize first principles thinking (mostly highly self-confident tech bros and big-tech veterans) are often the ones who fail most absurdly at actually doing it. It reminds me of the exchange attributed to Robert Surcouf: when an English officer supposedly told him, “You French fight for money, while we English fight for honour,” Surcouf replied, “Each man fights for what he lacks.”

P.S I don’t have any stance on the French-English conflict in the anecdote above.

It’s sad to see how these insights and “drops of wisdom” have changed to the point where nothing substantial seems to come from people who are in a position to influence, at least to some extent, the software landscape and where the industry is heading in terms of practices and approaches. Instead, we get shallow, very basic principles, still valuable, but often little more than mid-level-engineer realizations being spat out.

The worst part is that the product, the actual output, often feels underwhelming and at odds with the narrative around it. Action matters more than the narrative. Show these principles in your work and in how you engage with the community, rather than through shallow thought-leadership mumbo jumbo.

Another thing I find skin-crawling is bragging disguised as humility and sincerity. Come on!! Expecting people to buy into that performance is, in itself, a kind of insult to their intelligence.

> Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything?

This is what I think too. But, users’ psychology might be playing a role here. Anthropic has great advantage from being the first major player delivering functional agentic coding solution (rather than an intelligent autocomplete) and they were able to impress people by Opus’ iterative improvements early this year.

It’s technically very easy to switch between models, harnesses but their moat or perhaps a main source of users’ friction could be FOMO. That’s especially powerful in this competitive environment where everyone keeps wondering/worrying about what others might be doing to get or stay ahead.

“Talk is cheap, show me the prompt” is my go to request for dealing with people’s AI generated responses. Voice and tone varies, of course, depending on the recipient.

It feels like prompt(s) is where the actual thinking can be observed these days.

That response is freaking ridiculous and does nothing but proving the very point of the issue.

Even if that’s your genuine view of the reported issue, instead of posting a message full of word salad, you could just say something along the lines of “valid feedback yet i couldn’t reproduce, i will pass this along to our model team since it’s more about model behavior, etc.”

Also, that “generated by CC” feels overtly disrespectful and shows how little care goes into hearing feedback. But, why would you listen if no matter what you do your valuation almost doubles every several months (at least for now).

Very accurate (at least wrt my experience) yet so sad. It’s unfathomable how we ended up being maneuvered into accepting this as an “upgrade” to how we practice our profession, build things, solve problems.

For many reasons, it doesn’t feel sane and humane to impose this way of working on employees without their consent.

The tech space has always had some cult-like, belief-driven practices, but I think we used to have more diversity in terms of working cultures and conventions, which made it easier to find an option that better fit your values and way of thinking. Things are becoming very uniform, at a pace that could compete with dystopian fiction, where all of us are coerced into gathering around an “absolute” truth or at least operating according to one.

this is great! i can’t wait to give it a shot.

i recently had to stop using logi options, whatever the heck it’s called, because the app doesn’t start on my mac (sequoia). no error, no logs, nothing helpful can be found online. i gave up and started using bettermouse, which i have mixed feelings about. it does the job but the set of controls feels too complicated/overwhelming. i couldn’t find that sweet spot for my pointer speed/precision yet.

> Anthropomorphizing these models is doing immeasurable harm to society in ways we probably can’t event quantify right now

This is one of my biggest concerns about AI’s social impact. On top of that, models are positioned as superior to humans, at least in certain aspects (intelligence, knowledge) by AI companies’ PR campaigns, fear-mongering, and also by the changing tone of LLMs (e.g. Opus 5 sounds like a very patronizing, know-it-all, cynical person). I am afraid this is causing a shift in how humanity perceives itself and the way they relate to this technology, so AI might stop being a tool/technology and turn into a mythical, god-like superior being.

Yes! I had exactly the same experience. Quitting habits like smoking, drinking coffee, or playing video games has always been much easier during those periods, and it felt like it happened on its own. It was mind-blowing to notice that after it happened a couple of times.