jmull

Yeah, the people who didn’t set up the system and don’t control or understand it are responsible for it.

Let’s forget about the people who did set up the system, and do control and understand it.

Very reasonable. Very logical and sensible.

What are the "obvious rules" that could be applied here? (They aren't obvious to me.)

What semantics do you guess LLMs would better at, the semantics they are trained on, or something new with altered semantics?

There's no point to try to adapt our languages to the strengths of LLMs when the strength of LLMs is working in terms of our languages.

Implement whatever abstractions you think LLMs should work in terms of in whatever language is handy, and have your LLM use those abstractions.

"...tasks I could have done in 20 minutes easily, that took 5 minutes of an AI agent, and then 2 days for me to review..."

Yep. Part of the job of a software developer is managing complexity.

It's critical because of its exponential nature: as complexity increases it becomes exponentially more difficult to successfully change, understand, or support the system.

From any given position, AI seems to be the right next single move. When things are simple, it's fast and smooth. When things are complex, sota models can handle it, accounting for the details of dozens or hundreds of things at a time.

The problem is, without strict guidance, it tends to add complexity. If you let it, it builds systems at a rate and in a manner that a human cannot understand it. The best next single move leads to a poor overall position.

Then you have no choice but to keep using AI, and to keep upgrading to the next, more powerful model.

Or retreat.

It's pretty clear to me that, as a whole, we don't know yet how to develop with AI. People are mistaking token output or short-term progress for real progress. They people who are going to be successful with AI-assisted development are going to be the ones who can maintain control of their systems while they do it, and the key skill will be complexity management.

Yet these days ai companies can't stop promoting the idea of a looming ai threat.

Makes sense... they get the regulatory moat they want and can deflect attention from the fact their "sandboxes" are embarrassingly bad. It's an example of the real value of ai: something to blame for our failings.

Your scenario looks easy to detect and stop to me.

And of course people will try making money running scam bots. We can treat that like any other criminal activity.

How fast could the TS compiler have been made without changing languages? We don’t know, they didn’t do that. It sounds like the main increase was from parallelism. While not exactly ergonomic, you can accomplish that with worker threads in js, and they are a good fit for a tool like the typescript compiler. They chose to change languages and parallelize, which is fine, but a lot of that performance was on the table for javascript as well.

How does me not buying these glasses stop creeps from buying them to film people surreptitiously?

the legit uses don't need to be surreptitious.

> nobody is forced to work for DoorDash

It doesn’t matter who you work for, they still can’t underpay you or pay you late.

> This is one reason the open-model threat is not as large as it appears: frontier models don’t merely outperform older models; they are rapidly becoming cheaper to run at any given level of performance.

This really misses the point. The “threat” (to the profits of big AI companies) is that competition will drive prices down in a race to the bottom. It doesn’t really “help” (drive the profits for big AI companies) if that competition comes from open-ish models or from competing big AI companies or anywhere else.

Yes... We all want stuff for free that costs money to make, essentially insisting everything be ad supported. Then we complain bitterly about the ads.

(Remember when MacOS and Windows updates cost over $100?)

Why are people writing critical infrastructure in [any language]?

In reality, the tools this article is referring to were written in javascript because they could be and it was the best tool for the job (according to the people who matter: the people who did the work).

If someone wants to rewrite them for speed and/or to chase the next shiny language, that's fine with me, but let's not kid ourselves that there was something wrong with using javascript in the first place.

Using the right abstractions (including the right number of abstractions) and the right data structures and algorithms is always going to trump the constants language choice can optimize.

It's not the M5 Ultra itself, but the M7s or M9s that will do the damage.

99% of people will use whatever AI is free. The sophisticated, heavy users that are willing and able to pay a lot of money the ones that will be interested in controlling their inference bills.

Today, the sweet spot where an M5 Ultra makes sense is tiny. But we might expect that to grow a lot.

AI is like honey to these magical thinkers.

I hate that AI makes this kind of vacuous article appear, on the surface, to be credible enough that it makes it in front of my eyeballs.

Allocation happens. You can leave it to the compiler, the runtime, or let the code control it.

The automatic solutions are usually pretty good and usually the right place to start. But if performance is a priority, you want options.

BTW, “per-frame arena” is part of a general pattern of a repeated interval of work doing significant allocation. This is really common in software of all kinds… servers that process requests (like web servers and database servers) and typical command line tools.

> The security benefit can't be overstated.

Security benefit appears strongly overstated. Compared to using a password manager (including generated secure passwords for each account), there isn't a significant security benefit. passkeys require using a manager as well, so there isn't much point.

> ...but it would be my stupidity...

All people are stupid sometimes. A security flow that doesn't account for this very well isn't a very good security flow.

(Related: everyone tends to be unlucky eventually, and, unfortunately, everyone becomes incapacitated/dies eventually. Security flows need to account for these as well. Not to mention that in my experience, no software company continues to offer a quality service at a reasonable price forever. You're lucky to get 10 years. Having access to my accounts tied to a single piece of software is likely to become a big pain at some point.)

> refuses to allow me to authenticate to it because it wants a passkey I don't have... it wants me to use an Android phone I (also) don't have

And yet you love passkeys? How much will you love them when you're locked out of something you can't do without?

Open source is collaborative, and isn't exactly a niche thing, even at commercial companies.

Is that a settled question? China isn't exactly struggling right now.

> But don’t be the out of touch Kung Fu master, heir to lifetimes of tradition, that gets mauled by an amateur MMA fighter.

Seems like a fundamentally poor analogy. Software development is collaborative, not competitive.

Yeah, this 100% looks like an effort to use fear to create a regulatory moat.

I can't help but notice your counter arguments are "lol, okay" and "These are some 2024 arguments".

Not exactly convincing stuff.

Tailwind templates give you a quick way to get good, functional, customizable components. LLMs give you a quicker way to get good-enough, functional customizable components. You have to pay for LLMs too, but you aren’t getting the LLM just for the components, and component generation is included.

Looking ahead, maybe LLM subscription prices will eventually have to go way up to justify the huge valuations AI companies have. So maybe this could change, but it won’t be until anyone making a living from template has had to move on, so we aren’t going back to when that was a thing.

I used to be a fan of smaller phones -- my current one is a 12 mini.

I'm getting this thing.

Changes in eyesight change your priorities.

Nah.

Tailwind provides an actual simplifying layer for the (over-)complicated practice of front-end web development.

By being well-though-out, well-designed, and very well documented, it actually made web app styling easier/simpler (without hiding or otherwise making it hard to drop into CSS as needed). And it slotted right into the place most web apps have for a CSS/class mechanism.

The paid templates extend the approach to components. The business model is that the credibility they establish with the free high-quality CSS/class system makes people willing to pay for the templates, which then goes over well because the templates are good and useful, saving a lot of development time. BTW, their templates solves a different problem than native components -- I suspect you're dismissive of their business model due to not actually understanding it.

Of course, it's all moot now. AI can generate the components now at the same time it's doing everything else, so no reason to pay for their templates. (Plus, tailwindcss probably doesn't build the credibility as much anymore either because devs aren't using it (their AI might be, but without the direct contact it doesn't have a chance to build that open-the-wallet credibility.)

It's a weird article. Despite the title and some of the text, much of the article makes the point that LLMs are next-token predictors, where the predictions are based on both training data and various reinforcement learning techniques.

> You can just watch or read the mainstream news for a few days and see for yourself, really.

I read mainstream news, but I don't know what you're referring to.

It's not like they are perfect, but I do see accountability when they screw up.

I do.

I’m open to being convinced, but if you’re claiming mainstream media has no accountability, I think you need to substantiate that.

I realize there are information bubbles on the internet where this is accepted as truth, but unexamined. Nonsense is everywhere on the internet. I’d be curious how you’d substantiate this.