kaashif

Spore had that but I kind of liked it. I guess that was 20 years ago almost, maybe my standards were lower. It felt charming seeing others' animals, some of them looked pretty cool.

AGI would produce novel treatments for diseases at rates equivalent to what a human can do today.

Which is to say, not that fast.

Yeah, workflows like ruff then ruff --fix are ideal, or just outright banning certain libraries, or having policies like dependency cool downs.

It's funny because we're once again speed running what the best practices already are!

There is a step missing. Impolitely list what's wrong and try to incorporate any persistent themes into a markdown file so that the agent stops making the same mistakes. Put any rules into linters and static analysis and sanitizers and ...

I sometimes see people reviewing LLM code leaving the same review comments multiple times, or worse, after some time they just give up reviewing.

But this seems to be in agreement with the comment you're replying to.

Tourist visas are nonimmigrant visas. So are H1B visas.

Was the comment edited?

Pointless images are bad. Like those images at the top of blog posts, I didn't like those pre AI.

The way to use AI is to make sure it has clear, verifiable success criteria, test suites, etc. Make sure any output has citations, reduce the need for trust to zero, etc.

I see people one shot stuff and it makes no sense, is completely fake half the time, just like you point out.

It should be the case that Codex and Claude Code should incorporate this kind of thing automatically at some point.

At some point we'll have enough RAM, surely. The incentives to produce more are huge and all the fabs are booked out.

Maybe it'll take 10 years or 20 years. <5 years is not long enough for manufacturing to catch up.

Not much of a comment on the phone stuff but I'd caution against suggesting technology will never be good enough to do X. Maybe it'll be horrendously wasteful but it might happen.

Which is to say, they'll be banned in the US.

It's a pun on AI winter - if there's not going to be a winter, then it's always summer. But things won't be static.

It is in fact normal for new technologies to be adopted, and for there to be no cycle where the technology just disappears. There was no Internet winter or railroad winter, not in the same way there was an AI winter where AI just went away.

Those technologies had valuation bubbles but the technologies themselves stuck around and changed the world beyond recognition. If someone sees the rate of change and thinks it'll stop for...some reason, then they're the ones who believe things are different this time.

Can you give an example?

Being able to efficiently allocate labor with a more mobile workforce does increase productivity, this is well studied.

Here's a source, although it isn't that detailed and is more of a descriptive literature review: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/103581...

This too: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/07/oecd-employment... - but I didn't have time to read it in detail.

I don't think anyone believes labor mobility reduces productivity.

Why does it have to be a choice? Raise the median, raise the minimum, use wealth created through higher productivity and a healthier labour market to redistribute to some degree, everyone wins?

The frictions we're talking about, like health insurance being tied to an employer, make things worse for families anyway - getting rid of the distortionary regulations that cause that can only be a good thing.

I'm not American, but most people I know who are not in tech just use ChatGPT like they'd use Google but better e.g. what bird is this, what's a good word for X or Y, what's the weather, what was that movie with Z. Edit this meme for me, make this photo not have the guy in the back, how do I grow chillies, etc.

Now if you ask them if AI is making their lives better, they might say they don't know.

I literally don't know anyone who "hates" AI.

Why would you restrict to the US workforce? ChatGPT has a billion users.

Why does being a compressed corpus of knowledge mean it can't discover things? What if it has knowledge of techniques to discover proofs?

It does and that's what's happening.

Damn, looks like we have lower productivity than cavemen!

(1) Yes.

(2) Are you saying that you think we're at the limits of computing in general, or that specific technology?

We know, for example, that a human brain level intelligence is possible to run on a human brain. We are nowhere near that. And actually that's not even a physical limit necessarily.

But that is...not a low hanging fruit.

What if you forget to use that and just use let or const? It is better than plain try-finally or defer because you don't have to remember how to dispose of the resources but in terms of remember to dispose of the resource at all, I don't think that is all that different from Python's with or Java's try-with-resources. You can just forget to use using, with, try-with-resources.

There isn't any way to forget to drop a resource if you have RAII.

If the idea of computers is that they remember stuff for you and do stuff for you, then both try/finally and defer seem like hacks to work around not having RAII like e.g. Rust or C++ where resources are closed/disposed of/deallocated automatically.

Try X finally dispose of all resources. X, defer clean up X. Or how about just X and cleanup is done automatically, with the author of the resources deciding what is needed to clean X up.

"The race condition snapped like a steel spring."

I like the idea of the story, and cool ideas can be engrossing on their own.

But well written this ain't.

Right, and if you come up with an efficiency gain that makes scaling better, e.g. a 50% reduction in required compute. Or even asymptotic improvements e.g. moving from quadratic to linear. Then you're much much better off.

There is nothing about the bitter lesson that says just be dumb and pour money into a hole, you still have to invent the methods to scale well, and being under immense pressure with constraints seems likely to produce that research.

Someone is drowning and calls for help.

I throw a bucket of chum into the water and walk away, putting my headphones on.

Well I did take the time to help, better than nothing, right?

I always have my phone with me so I can take a note in that. But when I'm meeting with someone I prefer taking notes in a little notebook I carry, I don't want the other person to feel like I'm...on my phone while speaking to them.

Indeed. I guess we're talking about it, which is the point of marketing blog posts like this.

If it weren't claudeslop, it would still have to be marketing corposlop.

I only even heard about Jennifer Pahlka from Tyler Cowen's podcast, I think there are still some podcasts worth listening to.

Your point is well taken and very reasonable though.

Asking this question only a handful of years after a global pandemic...

If the next pandemic is 50% deadly, not being able to make gloves is surely the canary in the coal mine proving we wouldn't be able to make any other PPE.

And no country can rely on another if it's do or die. Other blocs will keep to themselves.

I think it's great someone is working on a fun little project such as a smart fan but let's not kid ourselves, it's not supposed to be practical! I don't think anyone would claim that.

It's a demo of how easy it is to make even an ESP32 device available globally with iroh.

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...