ryandvm

There some real game theory mechanics at play when it comes to LLM usage in corporations. Devs are cranking out superficially superior code and documentation by just aiming the Claude Code fire hose at everything they can. Leadership encourages this because from what they can tell, there is no downside.

It's hard to say if this code is structurally better or worse than before, but it's certainly voluminous and as far as leadership could ever tell, with their flawed metrics, that is all that matters. It will be years before we figure out if this is a good idea and worth the cognitive atrophy.

Anyone not using LLMs all day is just not going to be as prolific. I can't imagine that the same factors aren't at play in the scientific research community where it's all about how much you can publish.

> but also can't easily be disengaged from

I guess it depends on what you mean by "easily", but Putin could very much just say "fuck this" and turn off the war machine in one day and it's not at all clear to me that there would be much consequential blowback other than the personal humiliation of one man.

Would other countries now decide to attack Russia? Of course not. Would the oligarchs flip out and have him assassinated? No. Would the West disassemble the sanctioning apparatus? Eventually.

But the real downside is just simple humiliation and to prevent that, they will continue sacrificing young men.

Politics is a fucked up game.

Yes! This is awful. CC should not have copy/paste behavior that is different from literally every other CLI app.

It is... as long as somebody else thinks so.

I apologize for mistaking your 17+ comments in here for passion.

Are you telling me that you believe the nobody at SpaceX has run the numbers and shown the richest person in the world that according to the known laws of physics each data center will have to have MANY ACRES of radiator?

Fuck, even Grok would have told him this.

The SpaceX IPO was intentional deception - no doubt.

Because each business losing money has to be placed inside a larger Matryoshka doll.

Lol. Not when you just told everyone that you're going to increase your revenue by 100 times over the next 4 years "bY uSiNG AI!!!"

It was weird because it seemed authentic, but was not. There was nothing technically uncanny about it - the illusion was complete. Ten years ago I would have absolutely thought that it must have been Feynman's own voice.

I find it weird in the same way that I feel about AI services that will let you chat with deceased relatives. It's the principle of the thing that is unsettling. Perhaps future generations will find these objections quaint.

I suspect nobody's legacy survives the microscope.

I'm a huge fan of Feynman and his autobiographies - some of my favorite books. There are a number of YouTube videos that purport to be Feynman's audio lectures, but they're actually AI generated readings of his script. Against my better instincts I listened to a couple and it was surreal experience.

On one hand, they were actually pretty decent simulacra and I loved hearing Feynman's voice and mannerisms; but on the other hand, they... weren't... real. What am I even listening to?

We are in for a weird future.

I always liked the idea of a micro-deposit that the sender puts up for each email (say $0.001). If the recipient blocks your email and it ends up in their spam folder then you lose your deposit; if they read it then you get your deposit back.

The lost deposits would then be used to pay for the infrastructure.

I think we both agree that I need to spend less time in intellectual ghettos.

Okay, and you're not wrong, but it sounds like you're filtering out most of the shit that humanity is producing and then lecturing folks that say LLMs are smarter than most people.

It's kind of like you hang out in a Buddhist monastery saying, "I don't know what you guys are talking about - people are so peace-loving!"

Man, I appreciate your optimism, but I don't know how you can spend even 5 minutes on Facebook looking at the absolutely bonkers shit one's own relatives and neighbors post and still come away thinking that most people are "thoughtful".

Are humans capable of profound creativity? Of course. Are they actually doing it? No, not very often.

Precisely, it takes a special kind of psychopathy to have 100 million dollars and decide that you need to "keep going".

> on the other, whatever shady crap these guys do after it all goes ‘boom’ to save their wallets is only gonna reward people in the market

Yup. That's kind of my feeling. Are we in a bubble? Obviously. But the people who have the most to lose have never been more intertwined with the rule makers and have never been so shameless about it.

"Don't bet against the house" has never been more appropriate. We may well be on the verge of the 2nd Great Depression, but you can be damn sure that the last ones to lose will be the billionaires hanging out in the new ballroom. We'll be burning poor people for warmth before they allow the asset prices to collapse.

This gives "let's close the patent office"

They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly.

I'm as hateful of LLMs hollowing out the job market as the next guy, but the reality is the frontier LLMs are really good at writing anything that's been done and documented on the Internet a million times and unfortunately most of what software devs have been doing the last couple decades is shitting out cookie cutter CRUD apps.

I have my doubts about whether the state of the industry is going to advance as long as we're having LLMs do all the creation, but that's another diatribe.

Eh, his promises are ambitious.

And the gullibility of his investors is bottomless.

I too plan on increasing my revenue 100-fold by 2030.

The human brain has 80 billion neurons and a 100 trillion synapses. I think you're underselling the processing power of that warm chunk of meat.

The real message of the last 15 years has actually been the opposite: if you throw enough processing power at it, intelligence emerges.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

It costs $30M/unit because our trillion dollar defense budget is mostly just a jobs program (25%) and wealth transfer apparatus (75%). Killing people is just a side effect.

Yup. You can either A) ban AI (good luck) and teach students to understand CS fundamentals deeply - which will of course make them totally unsuitable for an industry that is demanding tokenmaxxing from every engineer; or B) embrace AI at the university and produce students that are nothing more than prompt "engineers".

I hate the AI revolution timeline even more than I was hating the political timeline.

> "Well, we were just responding to our business competition" The business knows no humanness, because it is not a human.

Yup. Except, by God, we ought to make sure the business has unlimited free speech (i.e. campaign contributions).

None of them go bankrupt. The whole thing will just get stuffed into a larger Matryoshka egg that IPOs for eleventy trillion dollars in 10 years.

Okay, let's give software engineers a break for a bit and focus on obsoleting other high-linguistic context occupations.

To be fair, at this point in my life I think unions are a net positive and probably the most effective protection workers have from predatory management, but the 25 year old libertarian take on this is issue is based on things like unions lobbying states to require licensure. Restricting entry obviously benefits incumbents, which is the very definition of gatekeeping, and it would have specifically hampered a self-taught engineer like myself.

There are enough cases of unions protecting bad actors (cops, prison guards) or lazy, tenured individuals that it's easy for a mildly privileged autodidact to decide they don't need the hurdle - or the help.

Yup. I was one of the self-taught software "engineers" from the 90s. I enjoyed making more money than I deserved for my special interest and for the duration of my career I was very much against software engineering unionization as it seemed to mostly be gatekeeping for a lucrative and enjoyable line of work.

Now I'm 40+ years old and my job has morphed from designing systems and writing code to sweet-talking LLMs into staying within my guardrails, or something. Whatever it is, it is very much *not programming*.

Obviously unions would be in a position to limit the software engineering wrecking ball that is AI, but I pushed against that and now I have to sleep in the bed I made.

It's a fair question, but it irritates me because it suggests that we should accept the self-destruction of vast swaths of the population in the name of perfect liberty.

The reality is that we have a lot of institutions that prey on consumers' biology in a way that is overpowering for the average individual. Social media, ragebait news, and junk food are good examples of legal products that hijack human tendencies for the purpose of commercial exploitation.

We do not allow unrestricted access to opiates because the average person does not have the fortitude required to resist addiction. It's becoming increasingly clear that some of these media products are able to induce drug-like dependency - and harm.

Fortunately, for the media products, I think the answer is fairly obvious. Sitting at the bottom of all this is advertising. Meta needs people looking at their screens 6 hours a day because they don't make money from subscriptions, they make their money per-view from the advertisers. FOX News or MSNBC are the same, if you're not holding your iPad with white knuckles wondering how democracy is going to end, they're not making money.