pegasus

Good points. On the bottleneck hypothesis, a new study came out in 2024 arguing that the 900kya population loss was, if not a statistical artifact, more likely a genetic sweep or genome takeover via adaptive advantage. Whatever might be the truth in this case, it is true that human evolution, especially on the cultural plane, has gone through a bunch of major leaps which have had the effect of one small population eventually dominating the global genetic pool. Basically, a winner-takes-all dynamic. One example would be the Proto Indo-Europeans who have replaced male lineages throughout Europe and beyond. There are other such examples as well, like Neanderthal extinction.

So, the most successful at arrogance? In other words, the least successful at humility? Ironically, since humble and human share a common root. Just playing devil's advocate here, but what you propose is not a good metric to maximize.

Evolution is survival of the fittest. That's not a tautology, it actually says something, namely that the traits which survive and thus propagate tend to be the ones that enable some form of adaptation to its living conditions to the individual. The paper lists a bunch of examples:

  - lactose tolerance
  - immunity and disease resistance
  - lighter skin at northern latitudes
  - metabolism and vitamin D processing changes in response to changes in diet after the rise of agriculture

All these traits go beyond just increasing the odds of survival, they improve the life of the individual directly. I.e. they confer fitness. Individuals carrying those traits will, on average, in that ecosystem they are inhabiting, be more healthy than those who don't.

> do humans _need_ most software?

Yes, if it's not redundant software. The ultimate utility is to a human. Sure, at some point humans stopped writing assembly language and employed a compiler instead, so the abstraction level and interfaces change, but it's all still there to serve humans.

To use your example, do you think humans will want to interact with AI agents using a chat interface only? For most tasks humans use computers today, that would be very unwieldy. So the UI will migrate from the website to the AI agent interface. It all transforms, becoming more powerful (hopefully!), but won't go away. And just how the advent of compilers led to an increase of programmers in the world, so will AI agents. This is connected with Javon's paradox as well.

> but that gap gets smaller every year (and will ostensibly be closed)

As long as you build software for humans (and all software we build is for humans, ultimately), you'll need humans at the helm to steer the ship towards a human-friendly solution.

> graded live coding examples for interviews

Yeah, for those you can just relax and trust the vibes. It's for complex software projects you need those software engineering chops, otherwise you end up with a intractable mess.

One thing I've learned by following a link from elsewhere in this thread is that while the total count of neurons in an animal's nervous system is not a good proxy for intelligence, the count of neurons in the forebrain is. By that measure, only the orca ranks higher than humans [1].

That doesn't mean language ability is a natural outcome of crossing a certain threshold of brain complexity; if anything it's more likely the other way around: this complexity being be driven by highly social behavior and communication.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

But LLMs can also explain code, in fact they're fantastic at that. They can also be used to build anti-censorship, surveillance-avoidance and fact-checking tools. We are all empowered by them, it's just up to us to employ them so as to nudge society towards where we'd like it to go. Instead of giving up prematurely.

There are no cartoon villains in general, that's the point GP is making by using the word "cartoon". Let's use some common sense, it's not like Trump and Hegseth got together and sneaked in the school on the list of targets just because they liked the idea of children being killed. It's naive to suggest this is a possibility worth considering.

This is very different from targeting civilians as a goal in itself, which is what it would have had to be if this was not just negligence, but intentional, as GP suggested. Parent correctly points out that there's both no political incentive for that, and that it's not realistic from a psychological point of view, given reasonable assumptions about human nature.

There's a paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19461

Abstract:

Self-improving AI systems aim to reduce reliance on human engineering by learning to improve their own learning and problem-solving processes. Existing approaches to self-improvement rely on fixed, handcrafted meta-level mechanisms, fundamentally limiting how fast such systems can improve. The Darwin Gödel Machine (DGM) demonstrates open-ended self-improvement in coding by repeatedly generating and evaluating self-modified variants. Because both evaluation and self-modification are coding tasks, gains in coding ability can translate into gains in self-improvement ability. However, this alignment does not generally hold beyond coding domains. We introduce \textbf{hyperagents}, self-referential agents that integrate a task agent (which solves the target task) and a meta agent (which modifies itself and the task agent) into a single editable program. Crucially, the meta-level modification procedure is itself editable, enabling metacognitive self-modification, improving not only the task-solving behavior, but also the mechanism that generates future improvements. We instantiate this framework by extending DGM to create DGM-Hyperagents (DGM-H), eliminating the assumption of domain-specific alignment between task performance and self-modification skill to potentially support self-accelerating progress on any computable task. Across diverse domains, the DGM-H improves performance over time and outperforms baselines without self-improvement or open-ended exploration, as well as prior self-improving systems. Furthermore, the DGM-H improves the process by which it generates new agents (e.g., persistent memory, performance tracking), and these meta-level improvements transfer across domains and accumulate across runs. DGM-Hyperagents offer a glimpse of open-ended AI systems that do not merely search for better solutions, but continually improve their search for how to improve.

> For Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, each person having their own website where they post and that post being pushed to these platforms is also another way to force interoperability on them or be left behind.

There's an acronym for this: POSSE (Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). Part of the IndieWeb movement, for those who want to explore this worthwhile idea further.

Probably some AI assistance was involved. Though you'd expect em dashes above, for example. A better example would be "No regression. No noise. Just compounding." It's not so much as to bother me, and I'm often annoyed by the ever-expanding tide of slop.

A hiker on a mountain might as well imagine that at the end of their journey they will step off onto the moon. But it's just a mirage. As us humans have externalized more and more of our understanding of the world into books, movies, websites and the like, our methods of plumbing this treasury for just the needed tidbits have developed as well. But it's still just working off that externalized collective understanding. This includes heuristics for combining different facts to produce new ones, sure, but still dependent on brilliant individuals to raise the "island peaks" which ultimately pulls up the level of the collective intelligence as well.

Sure, but it's entirely possible this point lies way past the expiry date of the universe itself (if there is such a thing). Plus, I do believe in magic - the magic of Life, the Universe, and Everything. And "42" doesn't dispel it for me.

So they're only interested in taking on customers who are OK with being treated poorly?

> you're going to see a different process for the first time in your life

That sounds very neutral, but wouldn't this, by removing the human element and flexibility from business transactions, be a further step along a general enshittification trend?

I have a feeling our collective leg is being pulled:

"The behavioural components of happiness are less easily characterised but particular facial expressions such as 'smiling' have been noted"

"Certainly, if television soap operas in any way reflect real life, happiness is a very rare phenomenon indeed in places as far apart as Manchester, the East End of London and Australia. Interestingly, despite all the uncertainty about the epidemiology of happiness, there is some evidence that it is unevenly distributed amongst the social classes: individuals in the higher socio-economic groupings generally report greater positive affect which may reflect the fact that they are more frequently exposed to environmental risk factors for happiness."

...pretty hilarious if you ask me :)

That's orthography, not semantics, but it's still part of the professional style steering the model on the "professional path" as GP put it.

> Why would that be desirable?

If we never try, we'll never know. I wouldn't be surprised if there is something to gain from a form of deterministic computation which is still integrated with the NN architecture. After all, tool calls have their own non-trivial overhead.

Sorry, but now you just sound straight-up pompous.

Starting with that absurd first paragraph offering proof for the otherwise inconceivable idea that there are are indeed topics that you aren't qualified to comment on - on one hand, and on the other insinuating that you surely must be more qualified than me to comment on semantics; continuing with the second, totally uncalled for given that I prefaced my comment with "to my ears", yet you didn't; the third, again redundant since I already mentioned that "received" is more general than "understood", so of course the meaning is different - that's the whole point, using a tool to find more fitting meanings, if they would be the same what would be the point?? The assumption is whoever uses the tool keeps the one they feel comes closer to what they had in mind, discarding the rest, no?

Let's stick to this particular example. Why is "understood" a better fit in that context (beyond the original comment suggesting it was closer to their intended meaning)? Because that's as much as we can hope for - to convey the desired understanding. (And yes, that includes connotations and the like, at least if you want to stick to a reasonable, not tendentiously restricted understanding of the word.) How the meaning is received depends indeed on other context, like maturity and generally life experience. For example, you were probably hoping that your message would be received with awe and newfound respect on my part for your wit and depth of insight. But instead, I found you comment merely tedious and vacuous. Consequently, I don't plan to check back on whatever you might scribble in response.

I disagree. To my ears, "to help me find wording that conveys my thoughts the way I want them to be understood by the reader" conveys the same meaning as "to search for a way to formulate my thoughts like I intend them to be received by the reader", only less convoluted and more precise: for example "understood" vs "received" - the former is more specific, the latter more general and fuzzy. The effect is to make the phrasing easier to read and understand.

Introducing "because" also adds to the clarity without weighing down things or changing the meaning. "Improved" instead of the bland "better" again is an... improvement.

I imagine GP didn't sneak in the tendentious "to fit with and be well received in the hacker news community" in his instructions.

Overall this was a worthwhile assist. I believe (totally understandable) anti-AI animus is coloring a lot of these replies. These tools can be useful when applied sparingly and targeted la GP did. It's true and very unfortunate that often they are used as the proverbial hammer in search of a nail, flattening everything in the process.

> The rewritten paragraph sounds written in the notorious "LLM voice". It's less direct, more pandering and removes injection points for further discussion.

Does it? I don't see it. If anything, it is more direct and clear, not less, i.e. "to help me find wording that conveys my thoughts the way I want them to be understood by the reader" instead of the more convoluted "to search for a way to formulate my thoughts like I intend them to be received by the reader". How is it pandering? And how exactly does it remove "injection points"?

It basically chose more precise words where that was possible, resulting in a net improvement, AFAICS.

We do worry much more about animal well-being than we worry about our "lumps of metal" (as a cousin comment fittingly put it). As we should, and generally I think we should worry much more about animal welfare. I find concerns for AI system welfare voiced by people like Thomas Metzinger wildly misguided.

Check out Code Bubbles: https://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp

I would be very surprised if that would be the case. Maybe you mean deepfake content generated by organized crime or state actors, but that surely is a tiny fraction of what's being generated on Grok or other platforms.

I imagine it would be the same for making (use of) models which don't add these watermarks, no? The punishable crime is providing or using the service.

Long-form content from controlled providers is by far the lion's share of what needs this regulation, at least at the moment. Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Or at least of better than the status-quo.

You generate it with that particular AI and look for the watermark :/

Yeah, they also outlawed murder. And stealing. And bribing officials. All universally unenforceable. Weird...