10,931 karma · joined November 30, 2011
tl;dr: two countries, divided by a common language.
Now: please make it rapidly reusable and at least 10x larger. Europe desperately needs sovereign launch capabilities in that class. Today, you were the first to cross the starting line. AWESOME. Have a drink, get some rest, and get back to work. Everyone will be rooting for you!
There are a number of such stories which tell about landforms which have been under the ocean for 11,000 years, since the great meltwater pulses raised the ocean at the end of the ice age. Long after the stories were documented by anthropologists -- who thought it was unusual that so much mythology would be concerned with the topography of the seafloor -- sonar was invented, which confirmed that the landforms existed more or less exactly as the stories said.
So personally I think that's pretty hard proof of at least 11,000 years of accurate oral tradition.
Thank you, Dolly. That meant a lot to us, and millions upon millions of other people too.
I'm a longtime space guy, so Musk has been on my radar for decades -- since long before he was a billionaire. He actually first hit my radar even before founding SpaceX, when he made a "Mars Greenhouse" presentation to the Mars Society in 2001 (I'm a founding member). Since then, I've built up a huge amount of respect for his technical accomplishments, which are indeed extraordinary. I wish to hell he'd stayed apolitical -- if he had, then we could indeed just talk tech.
But he didn't, and we can't. There was a time when the absolute best rockets in the world were German -- but if it's 1942 and you're talking about sourcing rockets from the Luftwaffe, then I hope to hell you'd be focused on a few things beyond just the technology itself.
Me: Hey Fable, I've got this massive, theoretically challenging, totally novel, ill-defined cutting-edge problem that I'd like you to solve.
Fable: < Doesn't merely solve the problem -- utterly obliterates it. Nukes it from orbit. Does a robust one-shot that takes several hours to complete. >
Me: Holy smokes, that was amazing!!!! But the formatting could use some simple refinements. Could you change the margins and maybe add a drop-cap at the start of each section in the user docs?
Fable: < Commences another multi-hour nuclear exchange with the code >
Me: WT?!?!
(The moral of this story is that bringing a nuke to a knife-fight is only occasionally the best strategy. And in more practical terms: Fable is amazing -- but only for certain classes of problems, and even if it were free there's a lot I probably wouldn't use it for.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/3sac4u/interactive...
With an AI, I can say "I don't understand that part, can you explain more?" Or "what about this concern I just thought of", or "I already know almost enough about this, I just need this one gap filled in." It's an objectively better experience.
(The domain, FWIW, is a geospatial transport-planning tool, including a completely custom microsimulation engine, with loads of options for visualization, analytics, etc.)
At the start of this development process, LLMs were capable of assisting with little more than the framework boilerplate stuff. That was very useful, but was well under 50% of the LOC. They were particularly bad at understanding the microsimulator, where they would routinely forget which end of a FIFO queue was the front. LLMs are routinely and correctly criticized for their lack of a true world model, and when it came to modelling real-world physical/spatial/geographic systems, the fact that they see the world as nothing but text was a huge limitation. Not just in terms of having a pretty hazy grasp on concepts like "spatial direction", but even more critically, being unable to rationalize about the "world-within-a-world" which the simulator is attempting to model. They were fully unable to do that.
That was 18 months ago. Now, Claude writes > 99% of my code. It demonstrates a far better grasp of first-order world-model phenomena (like "spatial orientation"), and a decent (but not fantastic) ability to reason about the second-order "world-within-a-world" that the simulator is creating. It's a huge improvement. For some areas of the code, I still need to spell things out very explicitly, giving precise instructions for how a method will work. That's definitely not vibe-coding. But for other areas of the code, I can just say "add this analysis or visualization feature", without specifying how, and Claude will one-shot a result that's somewhere between good and great.
So where we're at now is that Claude often needs hand-holding for some of the most complex areas of the code, and it definitely doesn't understand how the whole application hangs together -- I have to keep reminding it of that, and am constantly taking steps to ensure that it remains well-architected doesn't devolve into a collection of warring patches.
And yet -- in the past 18 months, the boundary between what the LLM is capable of and what I need to exercise control over has shifted MASSIVELY, and it has shifted in the direction of LLMs being more able to rationalize about meta-models and higher-order architectures.
I've got two small children. When they say they can't do something, I always remind them that they can't do that thing -- YET. What they can do today is very far from the ultimate limits of their capabilities. I feel similarly about the capabilities of LLMs. No, they definitely can't vibecode a Photoshop-class application. YET.
There's a robin who often sits in the fig tree in my back yard, giving friendly little chirps whenever I'm near. (I have no way of knowing whether it's the same robin from day to day, but if it's different robins then they all seem to be on the same wavelength.)
Anyhow, today a neighborhood cat came to the back door, and was aggressively friendly when I opened it. Clearly offering affection in exchange for... what? I've never given this cat anything before, apart from a friendly pat. Meanwhile the robin was overhead in the fig tree, giving totally different chirps than I'm used to. Clearly "warning!" "danger!" chirps. It was amazing how unambiguous they were.
I was puzzled who the robin's audience for this was, however. I'd never noticed it freaking out about cats before. Was it trying to warn me for some reason? Trying to warn other nearby birds? I couldn't see any. I thought that maybe it was just shouting at the cat out of general pique.
Then the cat led me to the answer. Turns out it had trapped an (uninjured) baby squirrel behind a planter box near my door. It couldn't reach the squirrel, and the squirrel couldn't escape. The cat seemed to be under the impression that since we were now friends, I could move the planter box and help it to get the baby squirrel. Sadly I had to disappoint it, and after unexpectedly acrobatic shenanigans, I facilitated the squirrel's escape instead.
The robin, meanwhile, ceased its warning chirps the moment it saw that I was aware of the baby squirrel. Then it watched the ensuing affair unfold, from the safety of the fig tree. Once the squirrel was safe and the cat had left disappointed, the robin looked at me, gave a few of its usual happy chirps, and flew away.
1. Eliminate / work around the electoral college system, which makes it so that people in the most diverse, educated, and economically-productive parts of the country have dramatically less voting power than a small minority of people who live in more homogeneous, less educated, and less economically-productive areas. This would significantly change the messaging needed to win.
2. Eliminate first-pass-the-post voting, which encourage candidates with extreme views, eliminate anything other than (largely false) political binaries, make it possible to win elections while receiving a minority of the votes, and make it so that the only viable strategy is to vote for the lesser evil rather than somebody you actually want.
3. Get the money out of politics. Make untraceably-funded super-PACs illegal.
4. Gerrymandering should be super fucking illegal.
Other places do this. They're more democratic than the US, and while they still frequently elect stupid politicians, none of those are as bottom-of-the-barrel as what the US is able to scrape together.
All I'm saying is that the argument that "It's not consciousness, it's just <insert any tangentially mathematical claim here>", is dogma. Given everything that we don't know, agnosticism is the appropriate response.
It wasn't very long ago that scientists were certain that animals did not posses thoughts or feelings. Any behaviour which appeared to resemble thinking or feeling was simply unconscious autonomic responses, with no more thought behind them than a sunflower turning towards the sun. Animals, by definition, lack Immortal Souls and Free Will, and therefore they are empty inside. Biological automata.
Of course this dogma was unfalsifiable, because any apparent evidence of animal cognition could be refuted as simply not being cognition, by definition.
Look, either cognition is magic, or it's math. There really isn't a middle ground. If you want to believe that wetware is fundamentally irreducible to math, then you believe it's magic. If that's want you want to believe, then fine. But it's dogma, and maintaining that dogma will require increasingly willful acts of blindness.
These sort of issues are what you trust the judgement of a good designer to navigate through. I have no doubt that Claude Design can be better than no designer, and probably better than a bad designer, too. But better than a good designer? I'm more skeptical of that than I am of software engineering.
At this point, Claude now writes > 99% of my code. I wasn't an enthusiastic early adopter; it took me a while to be willing to let go of the reins. But in tandem with LLMs getting better, I also began to realize that what happens inside the code is very rarely important enough for me to care about. Like, I care that it's secure, and performant where it needs to be, etc. -- but mostly I just care about its outputs. If it does what I want it to do, then how it does this doesn't really matter to me or my clients or my users. On the development side, my attention has focused to writing specifications and monitoring the correctness of the test suite, and > 99% of the time that's good enough. It's been a lesson in non-attachment to let go of lovingly crafting every single line of code, but the tradeoff in terms of productivity has absolutely been worth it.
What makes this viable is the fact that there's essentially a "hidden layer" (the code) upon which Claude can operate. My clients don't actually care about the code, and within certain bounds (correctness, security, performance, extensibility, etc.) it turns out that neither do I. This gives Claude a lot of latitude to solve things in its own way, and I think that's a bit part of its effectiveness.
On the other hand, with design there is no hidden layer. Every single aspect of the design is visible to the user and the customer. So the design reflects upon my work in ways that code does not. This means that the conditions which allow me to relax my grip on coding just don't exist for design. It's very difficult for me to imagine delegating design in the same way that I've become comfortable delegating coding.
That said: I suspect that the use-case for Claude Design will be for applications which today receive very little design attention. There are loads of applications where design is less than an afterthought, and the product suffers terribly for it. Delegating to Claude, in those contexts, would likely be a very big win. But for applications which already have designers obsessing over every pixel, I see a very limited role for this. Figma's market is mostly the latter -- the former, by definition, is not part of the market for design tools -- so I don't see them being threatened by this for a long time.
Finally, someone of consequence not kissing the ring. I hope this gives others courage to do the same.
1: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoa...
I miss the old social media. I'd love to have it back. Having moved several times to various corners of the world, I have dear family and friends who are scattered across multiple continents. It's difficult to maintain ongoing 1:1 connections across such distances, but I used to be able to keep up with them and their families -- and them with mine -- via social media. It felt genuinely communal.
And then the posts from them became increasingly interspersed with -- and eventually outright replaced by -- advertisements, rage bait from random people(?) I didn't know, and then eventually AI slop. All with the obvious goal of manipulating my attention and getting me to consume more advertising.
It felt absolutely gross. Not something I wanted my personal life to be associated with. I stopped posting. So did my friends. The end.
But I still miss the old social media, and would use it if it actually existed (not just as a technology or a business model, mind you, but as an actual network with the adoption needed to create those kind of connections).
It's already an uphill battle, because humans in large organisations seem to have an innately conservative bias which says that "nobody ever got fired for choosing ${giganticEvilStatusQuoCorporation}". That, combined with the fact that the US hyperscalars have, I dunno, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of ability to put their thumb on the political and regulatory scales, make this an uphill battle. There will need to be a specific plan for leveling the playing field.
What is that plan?
I'm at a point in my life (personal bandwidth hovering near 0%) where I'm not getting involved in anything unless I have not just a good reason ("this is a noble agenda; somebody should do something about it, and hey, I guess I'm a somebody"), but a damned specific reason ("I have unique capabilities which can help this specific initiative in this specific way").
Anyhow, in this particular domain, I'm pretty sure there are people who could be MUCH more useful contributors than I. I'd love to forward the "manifesto" to them -- except I know that they're in the same position as me: essentially zero bandwidth. Any new project they get involved with means dropping something else that's currently on their plate, and is presumably important. They're not going to do that on a lark. They'll need need a damned good reason to participate, before deciding to spend time on something new.
To be honest, ANY real power-players will be in this position. They don't have free time on their hands; they won't just join up in the vague hope that maybe it'll be a place where things can happen. You will need power-players on-side, and without a much more specific proposition, you're not going to get them.
But I'm glad you've joined. Job no. 1: that manifesto needs to do a lot more manifesting before it's fit for purpose!