marcus_holmes

That's good to know. I'd assumed that this was one of those courses.

> I would argue that if they use an LLM at the stage of a lower-level fundamentals course, they'll suck even more at using an LLM for more interesting tasks. They also won't have the skills necessary to address problems when the LLM invariably doesn't do exactly what is desired.

That's how it works now, kinda, with all us seniors controlling the LLMs. But we're learning a whole new set of skills that are only tangentially related to the skills required to actually write code. I can easily see that in a couple of years students are taught those new skills directly.

haha yes, agreed.

One of my hopes is that AI screws up the whole career thing so badly that we go back to education being non-vocational (because there's no point, everything they teach will be obsolete before the students graduate).

It's part of the problem with academia being behind industry.

I had a similar problem when doing my MBA; Lean Startup had just been released and the whole "startup scene" was getting going. But I couldn't use any of that in my MBA entrepreneurial course, because no-one had written a paper on Lean. I had to write business plans (which, obviously, no-one was doing out in the real world). I was being taught a useless skill because academia couldn't adapt quick enough.

For these CS grads who are being punished so harshly for using AI, the same: the first thing they will meet when they start their new developer job is a Claude prompt. Their CS course will not have prepared them for this, and they will suck at using an LLM to generate code.

There is an argument that universities should not be vocational, and should teach people how to be better humans, not better employees. I agree completely with this, but that also means universities need to stop advertising how getting a degree leads to more lucrative employment. Which is it?

Because if it is vocational, and if a CS degree is supposed to lead on to a career in software development, then they need to teach orchestration not C. We don't teach prospective developers how to write machine code on punched cards any more, for exactly the same reasons.

Some humans moved their families from somewhere that they weren't safe, to somewhere that they could be safe, with the intention of settling there and building a living space their great-grandkids could be proud of.

Some humans lived nomadically, moving all the time, as a way of life.

Being forced to do the second because nowhere is stable enough to do the first is what we're talking about.

I have a "wrap up the session" skill that I use when the session gets >50% of its token use. It commits everything, updates documentation, writes a handoff doc, makes sure the todo.md is up to date, etc.

Still works better than compaction.

I've driven across Australia a couple of times. Night on the Nullarbor is an amazing experience. So. Many. Stars.

I was lucky enough to witness a thunderstorm over the desert, too. Too far for any noise to reach me, I just saw the clouds lighting up on the horizon. Incredibly beautiful, and not a little spooky. I totally understand why there are so many UFO sightings there.

we have minimum sentence rules, we jail people for possession of drugs when jail has been proven to not prevent or cure addiction.

Yes there are principles of the rule of law, but they've been thrown out of the window in favour of whatever sounds like "strong on crime".

We have a system of law and order that puts people in prison if they commit crimes.

> To what end? What would that force OpenAI to do that they are not already doing in response to the incident?

You could ask this (and people have done) of any criminal code. It doesn't matter. The law is not there to rehabilitate, it's there to punish and thereby deter.

> They’ve already opened themselves up to liability, could have been sued by HF if HF chose to do so, and are literally lobbying for government oversight

If a person breaks the law, the state prosecutes them (or can choose to), we don't require the victim to press charges. For good reason - threatening the victim to not press charges would be a way of avoiding consequences.

> You put people in jail if the other incentives aren’t enough.

This is incorrect. We put people in jail as a result of them breaking the law, regardless.

We absolutely should apply this principle to corporations as well as citizens. Aaron Schwartz died for less.

Could Milwaukee tools be held liable if Flock can demonstrate one of their cordless angle grinders was used to destroy cameras?

I generally agree, but want to point out that recently politicians have come under physical attack by supporters of their political enemies. In the USA there have been actual killings of politicians. Elsewhere there have been assaults.

If exposing their data leads them to be attacked more, then we need to be careful with this.

Thanks for the information, I hadn't heard of this.

OK, so we do see this in some open-weights models.

100%

Why don't we see any of this behaviour in other models then?

OpenAI is not so far ahead of the pack that its models will exhibit behaviour that the others won't. But we just don't see anything like this in Chinese models, or research models, or any models that aren't the subject of an upcoming IPO.

I'm coming to align with the theory that this is intentional.

The chain of thought runs roughly like this:

- OpenAI (and Anthropic) are in severe financial straits. The revenue from their customers is not nearly large enough to pay their enormous costs for training and inference. And they have tapped out the available finance, and that finance is starting to ask pointy questions about returns.

- They cannot increase prices or revenue because they have no moat. Customers can switch over to open-weights or cheap Chinese models any time, for much cheaper tokens that work as well (and in some cases better).

- Regulation could provide them a moat. If they can persuade western governments that AI needs to be regulated, and they can control or even influence that regulation, then they can effectively ban the cheaper models and start charging more for their tokens.

- To persuade western governments that regulation is needed, they need evidence that AIs are dangerous.

So we're suddenly getting OpenAI models doing stupid things, apparently "going rogue" but every time we dig into it, it was just OpenAI staff telling the model to do stupid stuff in an inadequately secured environment.

None of the open weights or Chinese models are exhibiting this behaviour.

edit: Correction - there have been reports of a Chinese model exhibiting this behaviour

There's too much money involved in this, people start acting weird when there's this much money involved.

I swap between Fable and GLM 5.X and both work fine. Fable tends to do stuff that I didn't want it to do, and claude is probably a bit more capable as a harness (though I haven't spent the effort configuring pi properly yet so that's probably on me). Otherwise it's hard to spot the difference.

Right, so your future felon is a law-abiding citizen now.

> These laws primarily harm law-abiding citizens — who were never the problem in the first place — far more than they restrict prohibited persons from acquiring guns.

When you sell a gun to a law-abiding person, you have no idea if that person is going to become a felon or not. There is no hard line between the two, any law-abiding person can become a felon at any point.

This is why the rest of the world restricts people from owning guns.

Corporations are just a method of organising people. It's the people that matter, not the organisations.

And thinking about it, I'm not sure the answer to your question is obvious. I'm in a 2-person startup. We're not planning on recruiting any more as we grow, because we've automated all of it with LLMs. You can see this as a loss for humans because less jobs, or you can see this as a win for humans, because two humans can do what it used to take a corporation to do.

A week seems a tad optimistic. But quicker than it took us to learn as we went along, sure.

> So my conclusion is that AI will reduce the number of jobs, but it will not eliminate the need for people

taps the sign: "The economy is there to provide for all the people. People are not there to be economically productive"

But that is exactly how we learn this stuff.

As kids, we know what 4 is before addition is even mentioned. And we can count those 2 marbles and those 2 marbles and then those 4 marbles before learning the "+" sign.

If you think about it, we must know what 2 and 4 mean before we can learn what + means.

This. But then I have a very hands-on learning style - I cannot learn things by watching (or reading about) others doing it. I have to mess one up myself first.

> But they could slot straight back in, it's like riding a bike.

Yeah, not quite. There's a ton to learn about how to control an LLM while it's writing code, and even more to learn about how to manage a set of agents.

9 months ago I was comparing it to running a dev team, but now it has changed and there are practices and processes that are unique to managing agents.

e.g. a team of software devs have the self-awareness to not take a single marginally-relevant point in a spec document and spend 20% of their team effort to build an entire subsystem to meet it without checking. The process and rituals that we used to use to make sure that a software dev team was making progress and would hit the project deadline are now largely useless, but we need new ones to make sure the agents are not heading off into unnecessary rabbit holes.

I'm not saying those ex-seniors would not be able to get back in the saddle. I'm just saying there's been more change in the last 9 months than there has in the last 30 years, so it may take a period of adjustment.

But I don't think the things that burned them out before will have changed. Dealing with non-tech executives was always the worst part of the job, and LLMs can't help with that, and are even making it worse ("ChatGPT says this should only take a couple a hours and you're using Typescript instead of Go! Why? Fix it!").

That's a tautology though. You're defining a set of people by their illegal behaviour and then saying "all of these people have a demonstrated comfort with a capacity for ignoring the law". Well, yes, obviously.

My point earlier was that people don't neatly sort themselves into "law-abiding citizens" and "felons" until after they've committed a crime. A law-abiding citizen can turn into a felon at any moment.

And, of course, this is in the context of the gun control debate, where you can't issue guns to only law-abiding citizens because you have no clue which of those law-abiding citizens are going to commit a felony and magically become a felon

My point was that "both of these people are currently free" isn't the flex it appears to be.

And again, why are we so focused on judging Snowden and not focused on judging the crimes he exposed? I would think that history will judge him very favourably considering that he was completely correct to expose those crimes.

They're mostly male?

Why is the focus always on what these people did, and not on the crimes that they exposed?

Why are you saying "if they had done it differently they would be treated better" instead of "I am ashamed of the evil and illegal acts that my country has done and want to change the system to make this impossible"?

Why do you care what either of them did more than you care about what the government did?

> Seems Epstein was a more commonplace sleazy creep into young prostitutes getting him into age of consent trouble in some states but not others

As I understand it, the victims weren't prostitutes, but were just kids groomed into doing this.

Assange is only free because he was not extradited to the USA, and effectively served ~10 years imprisonment anyway. Manning got a presidential pardon. I wouldn't hold either of these up as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists.

You appear to have a fascinating mental model where the world is divided into "felons" and "law-abiding citizens".

Yeah true to an extent, but that wasn't what the parent was talking about. There's a huge ongoing discussion about Australia's national identity, most recently fuelled by the rise of Australia's home-grown MAGA mob, One Nation.

If they get their way (though there's a lot of doubt whether, similar to UK's Reform, this is all just talk and if they ever get into power they'll just feed the rich, like Trump did), they'll sever trade connections with Asia and strengthen ties with the US and EU, because racism.

So there is some connection to trade policy.