kaashif

I like how every time a new technology is invented and becomes big, people start to think it explains everything. Like how in the 16th/17th centuries some people thought the universe was a big clock. Or how in the 19th centuries people thought the universe was like a big steam engine. Or now we think the universe is a big computer.

Not saying this is wrong or that I've watched all of the lectures above or anything, but it's just funny to imagine that aliens might look at us the same way we could look at a monkey society saying that the universe is like a big one of those rocks they use to smash nuts open.

Computation and information really does seem universal though, so this is just a funny thought and not serious commentary.

Why?

Are people actually using AI to do programmatic refactors over million line codebases directly? That is far more insane.

Using AI to write ruff rules or clang-tidy rules with fixes is literally the same thing and obviously best practice over running AI in a pre-commit hook to do those checks and refactors...

No, they are talking about refactoring, not adding new functionality to code.

So it would be something like:

Rewrite this Python code to use match/case instead of if/elif/else chains, write a script using the ast module to rewrite the code, do not edit it yourself, also write some tests with clear inputs and outputs I can inspect.

Or something.

It does mean that the milk industry is a low value add commodity business where suppliers compete primarily on price and only survive due to protectionism and subsidies.

Food is important for national security so we should subsidize it, but it's a cost center. It'll never drive growth.

If that's what Mistral is aiming for, it would probably be better to give up now.

You do realize that the person you're replying to is not making a value judgement and probably agrees with you.

If you have two groups of people, one with a low but nonzero signal that they can do something, the other with no signals, is it still a good idea to use that signal?

You'll get fewer bad employees, but you also discard many capable people who haven't had the opportunity to even try for your signal.

It still is a signal, albeit a weak and highly inequitably distributed one.

Some earnest, light feedback: to my ears, "kick butt" sounds about the same as one of those euphemistic substitutions for swears like "gosh we darn well try our darndest".

It's just very funny to lead with that is all.

That's not the problem governments are solving. They're solving the problem of convincing the public it's a good idea to end the anonymity of internet use.

Not necessarily true, more rehearsal isn't the key to fluent oratory.

Many people can speak off the cuff fluently and confidently, avoiding "like", "um", and other filler words. And even if you're not speaking fluently, leaving silences as punctuation is more effective, IMO.

Many impressive speakers I've met actually cite Toastmasters! So their obsessive zeal actually does work.

More rehearsal does work too sometimes, but it does sometimes lead to speeches "sounding too rehearsed".

That's the reality China already lives in. Their weapon against US companies is commoditizing them, eliminating their moats and their profits by going open weights.

Same thing Meta was doing before they fell behind.

It would be extremely funny if putting things in space is cheaper and faster than dealing with zoning and local politics.

It implies that China, which can cut through much red tape and has great (and improving) utilities and infrastructure, lots of energy, can just build normal datacenters and save the cost of dozens of space flights.

Doing that kind of thing over Zoom just always felt fake and not fun to me.

Maybe some people are wired differently where that works, and I'm stuck having to meet people in person to connect with them for real. Which could be a disadvantage for me.

> The number of times I was asked to lunch with "the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team"

The fact that you read a comment saying that people have lunch with each other and respond saying you've never been asked to have lunch with anyone is interesting.

I guess it varies by company and what the culture is, but it's surely totally normal to just have a friend in sales or something and hear about something going on.

I really doubt the person you're replying to orders people to have lunch.

So maybe we do have it, and it is underwhelming? Or it's not underwhelming and we just got used to it.

Using that as an argument to say we don't have AGI doesn't really make sense.

Regardless of whether we do or don't have AGI, until I actually see the economy-ending job losses, I won't believe it.

Time isn't the constraint here, but ability. Someone complaining about how hard Rust is to write is probably not capable of reviewing Rust code very well.

The usual reaction or opinion from e.g. good C++ programmers switching to Rust is that the added guardrails and expressivity are great and make things easier.

Indeed. And someone accused me of being hostile and thought my initial comment was me making a mean joke:

> This reads like someone with ADHD took Adderall and accidentally focused hard for a day on the wrong thing. It has happened to me.

It is very far away from being a joke.

Actually, if you do something bad enough, your citizenship can be removed. This is true in the US, UK, India, and maybe others. The exact procedures and criteria vary.

It's not astonishingly rare. The comment you're replying to contains examples, here are some more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

I think going down side quests is good, that's how I learnt lots of what I know.

But if my goal was to run daily and my first step was to make an open source step tracker with a raspberry pi dock...

There isn't any joke in my comment. Apologies for the confusion.

Well if it's strangely hostile I'm sorry but "I need to focus on writing so I spent a few days stripping down a Linux distro" seems pretty disconnected.

I mean it's a fun project!

But it really reminds me of something I would do that isn't entirely positive.

This reads like someone with ADHD took Adderall and accidentally focused hard for a day on the wrong thing. It has happened to me.

I guess if this writerdeck works persistently for many projects then fine. But if every 2 projects the writerdeck gets revamped then it seems like a way to get a dopamine hit or distract ones self. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't seem like it's a net benefit in terms of focus.

Indeed. At least an LLM would've read the article and realized that.

#6 in usage by tokens. It obviously has some use case. My experience is that Gemini is much more token efficient than other models. Measuring tokens is like measuring distance travelled by measuring fuel consumption.

I mostly use Codex though, I can't be bothered to have more than one subscription.

Also, if you are doing something other than maximising returns then you'll be outcompeted and irrelevant in the long run unless you attract many billions in inflows, or the government tips the scales in your favour e.g. ESG.

There isn't anything functionally special about the human brain - why is there some reason to expect the human brain is capable of innovation but no program, even one far more powerful than the brain, is not?

You admit this possibility so I'm not arguing with you, but it seems far more plausible to me that we can build something better than the brain.

In the limit we can just grow brains and put them in computers anyway, then the debate is moot. That's a really hard problem but of course not physically impossible.

Have you considered that utilitarians actually exist?

If 20% more medical knowledge would save more lives long term, there are actually people, probably some browsing this website right now, maybe the person you're responding to, that actually think killing people up to the expected number of lives saved is justified.

I would personally call that evil, but it is thought through.

Children have better neuroplasticity but worse persistence than adults.

As an adult I just practiced writing with my left hand loads for basically no reason, it's not that useful, but I still did it for some reason. Now I can write illegibly with either hand :)

Trading firms are surely not hiring for the broad founder-like skill set Anthropic is. Trading firms want narrow extreme technical brilliance.

I've also seen this. But I'll extend it to saying that giving Claude to a bad programmer gives bad results.

And seeing how people use it: good programmers review output and iterate to get better output. But bad programmers simply trust the output is good: they have no ability to review it themselves and often don't try.

Why does whether we're in a simulation or not matter for whether anything is explorable?

You can explore how the simulation works, there's just some other layer you can't explore. Or maybe you can somehow.

When you look at the stars, are they real or a simulation in your brain? Does that mean you can't explore them?