saulpw

It's tricky because I don't want to write what no one is going to read (but that for some reason I'm required to write).

Yeah should have put it through an LLM to clean it up.

Yeah an electron is not a 'thing'. It's like saying there's only one wave in the ocean.

"Awhile" IME is 3-6 months. And they won't stay for 10% more when Meta offers them 50% more. It's brutal but I'm not sure the economics of 'training' add up for any individual company.

I wrote a contract proposal a few months ago and I absolutely did a few rounds with an LLM to get the result I wanted. Anyone applying for a job should be doing this with their cover letters. You know that HR has a pipeline set up with a prompt like "here's the job description, here's the candidate's info, rate the candidate on a scale from 1-10" so you can do the same and learn how to boost your own signal. I have zero qualms about doing this.

As for "verbiage", I guess that's too bad, I'm going to continue using it anyway. Interesting factoid about the word though. I will say that "utilize" is one of my pet peeves (99% of the time the word you actually want is "use") and I've excised it from my spoken vocabulary, but I like(d) how verbiage rhymes with foliage so I'm more reticent to give that one up.

You have to assume that in many situations a human is asking an LLM about the content you've provided, even if they or another human reads some or all of it themselves too. So it's valuable to proactively ask your own LLM in the same way, so you can see what the other person will get out of it. And tune the verbiage until the LLM tells them what you want it to :)

So let's think one more step out. You're supposed to train your juniors so that you have seniors when everyone else is scrambling. But when everyone is scrambling, the biggest and most-funded/most-profitable companies will be offering a lot more money than you can afford to pay your now-senior devs. Now I suppose you think those former juniors would be so grateful that you trained them, that they would be loyal to your company and continue working for what you're paying them, right? ...right?

A 100-year-old's children are 70-80 years old themselves, if they are still alive. They very well might be not be capable of taking care of a 100-year-old person. And not everyone has children. Rather than throw up our hands and say "too bad", perhaps we collectively have some responsibility to take care of those who aren't able to take care of themselves?

Perhaps Microsoft is the biggest one though? (Who could possibly be bigger?)

I've had several jobs that were great for the first 12-18 months before the manager that hired me left. Then they sucked for another couple years but the pay didn't change.

I thought it sounded like a nice gesture of trying to be helpful and making a small connection with their coworkers. One message a day is hardly "a bunch of noise". Even though you say you wouldn't have said anything at the company, you said something here, and that has a similar chilling effect on other people who might have been inspired by the OP to share their tips and tricks with their coworkers.

Sorry for the "personal attack" but my point stands, you may not think of yourself as a jerk, but I saw your comment and thought "this guy imagining himself being annoyed at a coworker for a daily message with a helpful tip might be more of a jerk than he realizes". As a jerk myself I judged myself qualified to make that assessment and commented accordingly.

s/seen as//

Annoyance is a clue; not about them, but about you.

> doing that on a blog has become much harder nowadays because trust in written content has been lost.

I also like writing, but I started a podcast for similar reasons. I call it "proof of human".

Migraines don't have to be painful, and 'inverted tunnel vision' is one of the effects I've experienced.

Sounds like a migraine.

You can't cross the Hudson. Every crossing bans ridden animals. If you can find a ferry to take your horse I'll concede the point. But...good luck.

You can't ride a horse from New York to Washington DC today, and it hasn't been possible for almost 100 years.

So enjoy the manual coding while you can. I don't hold out hope that it will be possible in the long run.

Well, hm, for the best of the world you may have a point.. :)

Because your neighbor is the same species and so you have some idea of what it's like inside their head.

When your neighbor is a different species, this is pretty much exactly what humans do: kill it. The more unfamiliar, the faster it gets killed.

Is it bad for the ecosystems, biodiversity, your soul? Yes on all counts. But it's pretty consistent human behavior.

Note that addition that's "trillion times faster" is purely an optimization, not greater intelligence.

And a society of humans does not increase our overall intelligence. It allows all of humanity to access the accomplishments of our most intelligent members throughout history (which is huge, don't get me wrong!) but it seems almost self-evident that our civilization as a whole is not smarter than Newton/Einstein/von Neumann/etc.

"They" don't care about "fixing" the DMV. It's nice to think that "they would if they could" but in fact, the anti-government party actively cripples and dismantles government services so that people lose faith in government's ability to improve lives. And what would "fixing" it look like, anyway? Lower cost to operate or lower time-in-queue? Those are in conflict and as much as I would appreciate a better experience there when I have to go (once every 5 years), I think few people would be willing to pay $X/year for that.

On the other hand, my personal computer setup is better than it's been in a long time. Other peoples' software that I run has not improved much, but I've managed to fix several long-standing issues by just giving Fable access to my configuration and telling it my intent.

I've also vibe-coded several applications which are lighter-weight versions of things like Pinboard, Descript, and Weechat. I'm not releasing them because I've been doing OSS for 10 years and I've felt first-hand how the economics of open-source is skewed. And in this day and age where anyone can vibe up their own custom app, it doesn't feel worth it anymore.

What this tells me is that there's not proper incentive for the software you use to get "better" according to your values. You have implicit metrics of "cleanliness", "minimalism", "anticipatory design", and I share those values, but having worked as a SWE for 30 years, I have never worked for a corporation which encouraged those values. If I managed to inflict them on the corporate software I created, it was a "yes and" situation and I only did it because I (or other engineers) cared, never because management wanted it.

So the problem is not "AI is failing us" but rather "the system is failing to use these awesome tools to improve our lives". We can use AI to try to improve the system itself, but our system is not a github repo you can deploy to prod. It's a bit trickier to vibe up the improvements to our incentive structure (though I am trying to do it a bit myself).

I think there's an intelligence limit, or at least asymptote. It may be above human intelligence, but I don't think it's miles above it (at least not the kind of intelligence humans can create, recognize, or use). For example in Go, most estimates place God or "perfect play" three ranks above top professionals[0]. In the latest human-AI Go match, the human got a 2 stone handicap. So it's not like we have a lot more frontier to push there.

[0]https://senseis.xmp.net/?HandOfGod

claude fix it

If fewer people die, there is only less liability to assign. Remember that the original argument was "FSD needs to have 0 fatalities before we adopt it". And it's not valid to argue that some traffic fatalities are unavoidable; I know people who work at the DOT and "Vision Zero"[0] is a thing, and already implemented in some European countries/cities. Without FSD. So FSD needs to clear this bar.

[0] https://visionzeronetwork.org/about/what-is-vision-zero/

I can think of several billionaires who would be quite fine ruling over a devastated and machine-led earth. Their families are chosen or bred to agree with their amorality, and they and their dynastic families would rule with pleasure.

Reducing inflation is indeed one of the reasons, but what I was getting at is that the government doesn't "need" people for tax revenue to pay for its services, contrary to popular belief. It needs taxes to make its money valuable.

L. Randall Wray, "What Are Taxes For? The MMT Approach" (2014):

> Sovereign government does not really need revenue in its own currency in order to spend. It is the tax that 'drives' the currency. If we eliminated the tax, people probably would not immediately abandon use of the currency, but the main driver for its use would be gone.

No, because you can punish bad drivers, remove them from the driving pool, put them in jail, or in some way achieve justice (this may not always happen, but at least it's posible). There is no way for FSD to have any accountability, and so no justice can be served. "Sorry, your son was just unlucky that he was killed by the AI, but we can't do anything about it" is an intolerable breakdown of justice. Same problem we have with qualified immunity.

National governments which can print their own currency don't require people for tax revenue. They use taxes to compel people to acquire their currency to give it value. If they can instead compel AIs to acquire their currency, they won't need humans for that either.

I have a friend who writes, she has certain needs, I've shown her how to start building tools, she has no interest in building tools. She's focused on writing and does not think about her personal process that way. Not every is a tool-builder, in fact most aren't!

They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.