kokanee

> developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.

I feel like there are two challenges causing this. One is that it's difficult to get good data on how long the same person in the same context would have taken to do a task without AI vs with. The other is that it's tempting to time an AI with metrics like how long until the PR was opened or merged. But the AI workflow fundamentally shifts engineering hours so that a greater percentage of time is spent on refactoring, testing, and resolving issues later in the process, including after the code was initially approved and merged. I can see how it's easy for a developer to report that AI completed a task quickly because the PR was opened quickly, discounting the amount of future work that the PR created.

They said corks are fine. For grolsch tops, the kind of rubber might matter, I'd guess.

It is a web app, though. You just aren't running the server, OpenAI is. And you're packaging the front end in electron instead of chrome to make it feel as if it all runs locally, even though it doesn't.

Side note: I don't see a license anywhere, so technically it isn't open source.

If we back away from philosophy and think like engineers, I think you're entirely right and the question should be moot. I can't help but think, though, that in spite of it all, the Elon Musks and Sam Altmans of the future will not be stopped from attempting to create something indistinguishable from flesh and blood.

Philosophical thought: if the aim of this field is to create an artificial human brain, then it would be fair to say that the more advanced the field becomes, the less difference there is between the artificial brain and a real brain. This begs two questions:

1) Is the ultimate form of this technology ethically distinguishable from a slave?

2) Is there an ethical difference between bioengineering an actual human brain for computing purposes, versus constructing a digital version that is functionally identical?

Attestation is a compelling technical idea, but a terrible economic idea. It essentially creates an Internet that is only viewable via Google and Apple consumer products. Scamming and scraping would become more expensive, but wouldn't stop.

It pains me to say this, but I think that differentiating humans from bots on the web is a lost cause. Proof of work is just another way to burn more coal on every web request, and the LLM oligarchs will happily burn more coal if it reduces competition from upstart LLMs.

Sam Altman's goal is to turn the Internet into an unmitigated LLM training network, and to get humans to stop using traditional browsing altogether, interacting solely via the LLM device Jony Ive is making for him.

Based on the current trajectory, I think he might get his way, if only because the web is so enshittified that we eventually won't have another way to reach mainstream media other than via LLMs.

> Everyone else either performs a charade of doing their job—leaders still leading, managers still managing—or relaxes and collects an incredibly luxurious universal basic income.

For me, this was the most difficult part to believe. I don't see any reason to think that the U.S. leadership (public and private) is incentivized to spend resources to placate the masses. They will invest in protecting themselves from the masses, and obstructing levers of power that threaten them, but the idea that economic disparities will shrink under explosive power consolidation is counterintuitive.

I also worry about the economics of UBI in general. If everyone in the economy has the exact same resources, doesn't the value of those resources instantly drop to the lowest common denominator; the minimum required to survive?

Yeah, someone will probably make AI less damaging at some point. So let's not worry about it. That's the right mindset.

Edit: it's sad that I'm not sure if the downvotes are because people can't tell that this is sarcasm, or because they know that it is.

It seems like the author has never worked on an interface that uses realtime UI syncing. The points about cumbersome and mundane issues when working with REST UIs are not wrong, but the challenges of working with realtime synced UIs are substantially more difficult. And I'm not talking about conflict resolution, which can be abstracted by many existing solutions. I'm talking about the intricacies of UI behaviors that are specific to each application, when suddenly every interactive element can potentially be interacted with by multiple parties simultaneously.

For most applications, the status quo whereby a little bit of recent state is maintained locally, and periodically pushed to a centralized store, seems to provide the best overall balance of complexity and functionality. One exception is that most applications do a poor job of actually maintaining the local state (e.g. most forms clear when you refresh the page, which is not hard to fix).

To push this metaphor, I'm very curious to see what happens as new organic training material becomes increasingly rare, and AI is fed nothing but its own excrement. What happens as hallucinations become actual training data? Will Google start citing sources for their AI overviews that were in turn AI-generated? Is this already happening?

I figure this problem is why the billionaires are chasing social media dominance, but even on social media I don't know how they'll differentiate organic content from AI content.

The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people. The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it.

These legal protections are needed by the people. To the Pirate Party's credit, undoing corporate personhood would be a good first step, so that we can focus on enforcing protections for the works of humans. Still, attributing those works to CEOs instead of corporations wouldn't result in much change.

As our grade school teachers warned, my arithmetic skills are indeed brutally stunted thanks to calculators. The implications do seem even worse with folks using AI to do their technical debugging and decision making, though.

I remain perplexed that everyone is so focused on using LLMs to automate software engineering, when there are language-based professions (like Spanish tutor, in your example) that seem more directly threatened by language models. The only explanation I've heard is that the industry is so excited about reducing spend on software engineering salaries that they're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and largely ignoring the square holes.

I take issue with the options of "RAY-ghex" and "RAY-jeks." In my experience you can say either "REH-ghex" or "REH-jeks."

I thought the title was saying that OP's e-commerce website had failed

> or you need a special precise subset to communicate with AI

haha, I just imagined sending TypeScript to ChatGPT and having it spit my TypeScript back to me. "See guys, if you just use Turing-complete logically unambiguous input, you get perfect output!"

They are useful if you don't care whether the information is correct, don't care where it came from, and don't care that it was stolen from publishers who in many cases invested time and money with the expectation of receiving search traffic in exchange.

Coming from Figma this article feels like a poorly veiled plea for customers, disguised as thought leadership.

This take discounts the implications of the fact that the efficiency and cost of Deepseek's product are orders of magnitudes better, plus the project is open source. Those facts fundamentally shift the business conditions for LLMs.

Parallel universes enter the conversation because we (non physicists) can't identify any scenario explainable with classical physics that allowed those paths to be taken in the allotted time and space.

Tomorrow, LLMs will be able to perform slightly below-average versions of whatever humans are capable of doing tomorrow. Because they work by predicting what a human would produce based on training data.

Electrochemical cells (especially PEM electrolyzers) are notorious for containing materials far more expensive than copper (noble metals). But they pay for themselves much more quickly than you might think, if you can get offtakers to actually purchase and use the resulting products.

The biggest challenge facing these climate tech industries right now is the chicken-and-egg problem. You can't make anything cheaper than the centuries-old fossil-based competition unless you do it at scale; you can't scale it without offtakers; offtakers won't participate unless it is cheaper than the status quo.

There are compounding issues with expensive infrastructure upgrades (e.g. airplane or maritime engines that need to be upgraded to handle new fuels; pipelines or fuel trucks that need to be build to handle hydrogen, etc) that further push out the break even date. And then you have oil & gas companies inserting themselves into these efforts in order to greenwash their businesses, causing many would-be supporters to oppose entire clean technologies due to the perception that green tech startups are in bed with the fossil industry.

> What, uh, do they think they're going to do?

They published a charter. They're going to establish guidelines for sustainable web development and tools for measuring your impact. Yes, static architectures will probably be one path for improvement.

> There will always be competing interests, so a body that only exists to checks notes talk about ""sustainability"" on the web feels moot.

I'm not following this point. The existence of entrenched interests means that no opposing interests should be researched? Why is "sustainability" in quotes, is it not a legitimate pursuit, or are you implying that they have ulterior motives?

> They explicitly say hardware is out of scope. Cool.

Hardware is out of scope "unless related to hosting & infrastructure," AKA the cloud. That is an absolutely massive scope within the hardware realm.

> Honestly, reading the manifesto [2] just makes me more angry. It doesn't say anything.

It sounds like you're looking for the guidelines that this group aims to publish. A manifesto in this context is not intended to be a solution or a prescription; it's a framework for alignment towards a goal. The concrete solutions are the goal of the group.

Yes, thank you for answering on my behalf. To underscore this, the decision is whether to set up all of your dependencies and configurations with a tool like bash, or to set it all up within Docker, which involves setting up Docker itself, which sometimes involves setting up (and paying for) things like registries and orchestration tools.

I might tweak the apartment metaphor because I think it's generous to imply that, like a hotel, Docker does everything for you. Maybe Dockerless development is like living in an apartment and working on a boat, while using Docker is like living and working on a houseboat.

There is one thing I definitely prefer Docker for, and that's running images that were created by someone else, when little to no configuration is required. For example, running Postgres locally can be nicer with Docker than without, especially if you need multiple Postgres versions. I use this workflow for proofs of concepts, trials, and the like.

I'm a waffler on this as well, increasingly leaning away from containers lately. I can recall one time in my pre-Docker career when I was affected by a bug related to the fact that software developed on Mac OS ran differently than software running on CentOS in production. But I have spent untold countless hours trying to figure out various Docker-related quirks.

If you legitimately need to run your software on multiple OSes in production, by all means, containerize it. But in 15 years I have never had a need to do that. I have a rock solid bash script that deploys and daemonizes an executable on a linux box, takes like 2 seconds to run, and saves me hours and hours of Dockery.

Sure, this a correct mindset, and an obvious one for people who build and maintain information repositories professionally, but at an average company with hundreds or thousands of people, it's a losing battle to enforce. Paying for Slack and having the ability to find information in conversations that should have been documented but were not is valuable in practice.

There are two interesting cases of blue fish in my home state.

1. The Beardslee Trout, which exists only in a single lake in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beardslee_trout. Most photos online of these fish, including the Wikipedia thumbnail, are not representative of the stunning color of these fish in person, and are most likely not Beardslees at all. The lake itself looks like blue gatorade, and the fish have obviously adapted accordingly.

2. Lingcod, a fraction of which are a crazy alien blue color not only outside but throughout the flesh. https://oregonmarinereserves.com/2021/08/31/lingcod/. This phenomenon applies to a handful of species, but lingcod is the most well-known.

It's true... the quality of content on the Internet has a bunch of problems, and AI is just one of them. The economic incentives to trick people into staying on your page and scrolling as much as possible are a fundamental part of the problem. Politically-motivated ragebait and lies are a separate huge problem. AI-generated slop is also a problem for content quality and UX, but I'm far more concerned about the impact of AI on the value of human labor and intellectual property than I am about the UX of my search result pages.

The idea that they would give ChatGPT away to consumers for free without mining the data in some form or another is naive.

The partnership is structured so that Apple can legally defend including language in their marketing that says things like "users’ IP addresses are obscured." These corporations have proven time and time again that we need to read these statements with the worst possible interpretation.

For example, when they say "requests are not stored by OpenAI," I have to wonder how they define "requests," and whether a request not having been stored by OpenAI means that the request data is not accessible or even outright owned by OpenAI. If Apple writes request data to an S3 bucket owned by OpenAI, it's still defensible to say that OpenAI didn't store the request. I'm not saying that's the case; my point is that I don't trust these parties and I don't see a reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.

The freakiest thing about it is that I probably have no way to prevent this AI integration from being installed on my devices. How could that be the case if there was no profit being extracted from my data? Why would they spend untold amounts on this deal and forcibly install expensive software on my personal devices at no cost to me? The obvious answer is that there is a cost to me, it's just not an immediate debit from my bank account.