scorpioxy

Yes, I don't think it's new either. In fact, this illusion that machines are suddenly "thinking" or are "intelligent" is just coming from ignorance and/or falling for the current hype cycle.

I've been around for a few of these and I remember what was being said and written at the time. The after effect is very different to what was being predicted. Is it the same this time? Who knows. But the hype machine is at full power for this one.

Sorry, I don't remember. But I think it was in this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukpCHo5v-Gc

Though I believe the core of his opinion hasn't changed so any video would tell you a similar thing or at least that's how I understood it. That LLMs, in the hands of an "expert", can enhance the way you work. Which is very different and a lot more realistic to what the current AI companies are saying(or were saying before they toned it down a bit for their IPOs).

That's what Terence Tao said in one of his recent videos about it. That what the LLMs can provide is scale that humans can't. The example he provided is checking many possible solutions in a short amount of time because they can review all the previous literature and, for example, rule out ones with errors. He was realistic and practical about it and said that the tools working this way can be very helpful for a human mathematician to use even if they're not "thinking". I find that to be a good balanced view that, unfortunately, seems to be rare these days. Even on this forum.

For a while, I used a firefox extension called "Temporary Containers" which would, as the name implies, create a temporary container for each site you visit. Combined with specifying some custom rules for ones you want to open in a specific container, that was a very convenient setup. But the extension at some point corrupted my firefox profile and has been unmaintained for a while so I didn't try again. I am not sure what happened and it may have been the combination of extensions that was the cause of that. Sadly, the author passed away, if I remember correctly, and it's been difficult to find maintainers for the project so I gave up on that.

You can still install that extension but from the reported issues the functionality and bugs were increasing with every new firefox version. And obviously that setup only helped with the cookie aspects and not necessarily any security issues from javascript and so on.

A suitably specc'ed VPS from any provider with a good enough reputation. You can start small and upgrade if/when needed. I used to be a fan of Linode, also Hetzner but their recent price hike was unfortunate. Any provider that's been around for a while will probably have similar services.

"Coding" has been a solved problem for a couple of decades now, in my opinion. If what you're after is producing a large amount of code while paying very little, that was always an option. The results were, as businesses who went down this route discovered, not satisfactory. Now LLMs can do this even cheaper and faster. But was this the problem? Is this the magic that was missing to move us forward?

I don't know the future and can't say if you're wrong or right. But I do wonder what "more code, faster" is meant to address exactly.

In my point of view, it depends how you describe your role. If you're a "coder" then yes, you can't compete with machines. I do have to tell you that we're in a bubble and probably in the shrinking phase of an economic cycle so it's all difficult now but you can't predict the future from this temporary phase.

Depends on your risk appetite I'd say. But the most straight forward set up that I believe gives you a decent amount of protection would be to use a VM to host the LLM and then execute any agents that would be running the various apps on your machine via a sandbox with access to only the things it needs.

There are many variations to that(firewalls, sandbox abilities etc) but it's a good start in my opinion. And, most importantly, is a far cry from all the people I read about running agents on their machines with admin access and access to their emails and calendars and lives.

In my culture, that's the goto herbal drink for when you have a stomach ache due to indigestion or gas by the way. I don't know how or why they work but some of these things do work. The footnote here is that it is for pain/discomfort that would also go away by itself if untreated. It just speeds up the process and provides some comfort. For different kinds of pain/discomfort, a doctor needs to be consulted of course.

This whole article is very strange to me. Consider the following quotes "I have been launching new game features so fast that the players asked me to slow down." and "using magic tricks that are a year ahead of their time. It's a system that we can ride so hard that it scares the players and they tell us to slow down. " That tells me a lot about the operation.

Maybe I'm out of touch but none of what was described seems like a sustainable operation or business. Fun experiment perhaps but that's it.

In another section there's also boasting of how the problem was that more code was needed to be produced and faster. I don't know. Was that really the problem all along before LLMs and agents showed up?

Thunderbird has been great for me. With internal email systems, connection issues were usually due to proprietary protocols doing things in weird and undocumented ways that was the problem.

I've had a few issues with it for sure but still on it as nothing compares. Definitely not for the price. You didn't say what's incomprehensible about the UI, it seems fine to me. I don't need my email client to look slick(subjective anyway), I just need it to work and work well.

Ah, I may have misunderstood your comment. I thought you were leaning more towards the "dream" part. But so my comment also meant to say that the definition of ambition and success changed after becoming a parent. I know I won't be curing cancer in my lifetime and so what thing is really important that I have to sacrifice time with my children for? To me, being the founder of the next failed facebook for cats is just not it.

Note that I am not talking about earning a living and thus necessarily sacrificing time doing that and showing your kids that sometimes you have to work hard to survive in a decent way. I am talking about the parents who outsource their children to childcare to work to pay off the loan on their third car and newest iphone and tell you that they have no choice.

The middle way, perhaps? What "dreams" are more important than having a strong connection with your kids? Not only are the regrets that will come later in life huge and legitimate, they would also be irreversible. But, assuming you're in relatively good health midlife, you can always attempt to build the 5 startups that will almost definitely fail. Just my opinion of course.

I saw a documentary(forgot the name, sorry) about that that said, no you can't choose not to join. I forgot if it was about this organization but it was about maple production in Canada where a farmer wanted to do their own thing and they were intimidated and all sorts of nasty things happen to them because they didn't think the org was just and wanted to sell freely. Very interesting documentary and an eye opener that even farmer unions can act like organized crime when there's money involved.

Yeah, I don't know about the whole "THEY'RE on the hook". When it gets to the point where you discover that your lawyer didn't do what they're supposed to do, you're deep in the hole.

A recent experience for me was a lawyer I hired just forwarding whatever their LLM service said. Granted it was for a commercial contract so doesn't require that much legal muscle, I imagine, but I had to go through multiple rounds of feedback just to point out problems in their amendments. And the response was something along the lines of "yeah that could be a problem, let me review it". It was quite a bit of money too but the experience left me without much confidence that having a lawyer review the contract was any better than just running it through any capable model myself.

I was once commissioned to teach such a "bootcamp". It was a 4-months duration but 1 day a week. So something like 2-4 weeks total duration. I found out that the students were promised that this was enough to get them a job doing software development and were disappointed when I told them it wasn't. So towards the end, I took some time to explain what was missing and why it will take MUCH longer to even just learn the basics. The organizers were not happy at all that I did that.

To be fair, there were a bunch of students that did listen and worked hard on their assignments and projects and went on to integrate what they learned into their chosen profession and progressed in their jobs. I was very proud of that bunch.

Surprisingly, I wasn't asked by the organizers to teach again. It also didn't help that midway I was asked to switch from teaching web development to machine learning and they didn't really like it when I said "but those are two very different things".

In my experience, point 2(no strategy or plan) was always the problem. AI is not going to help you there. Saying you are AI-native might help you get some funding in this bubble but you will still need to show results. The rest of the points have always been valid and nothing to do with the current AI cycle. Just my experience and opinion of course but this is across a few different countries.

Thank you for answering. I agree with you that, if used well, LLMs can be useful tools and increase efficiency. Unfortunately, what I am increasingly seeing is an increase in confidence but no increase in knowledge or understanding. I hope this is just a side-effect of the hype and corresponding bubble and not the future trajectory of knowledge work.

Question if you don't mind. Would you have considered outsourcing the application you mentioned? As in, paying someone else to do it?

To me it is great that LLMs are allowing more people to use computers and software the way they were meant to. But the people that are using them this way, in my opinion, wouldn't have commissioned anybody to do it anyway. They'd just live with whatever process/pain they have. So jumping from "I can now produce a prototype in a weekend" to "software development is dead" has always felt strange to me. Just something I've been thinking about lately.

Perhaps it's my lack of domain knowledge but I am pessimistic about all these magical sounding drugs. There are some horrible diseases out there that are not ageing related that still have no cure and no treatment. I don't know if it's a matter of money, they just sound like really complicated illnesses which humanity has very little understanding of. So things like "reversing ageing" sounds like far fetched when even simpler processes are difficult to understand and control.

I've been reading articles that are telling me how they're prompting from their phone at 2am(and how they know that's not great) and when they're out driving their kids to their activities etc. They say all that as if it's something to be proud of. And what for? Oh they released all these packages that no one is going to use.

Burnout is real and these people have lost track of what's important.

Oh yeah, that sounds wise to me. Some people don't run the agents on a VM on their own machine and opt for a VPS somewhere. And I was wondering if privacy and security had anything to do with their decision.

Is the trust concern for the agent running in any form on your machine? Like in a VM on your machine as well or do you mean on the host itself?

I have read about people giving an agent full access to their main system saying they have nothing of value. To me, that's a strange opinion to have with the distinction between what's private and what's secret.

In my experience, all of this is a reflection of the work or team culture. You can replace the infra cost cutting with bug squashing and write the same article. As in, is the quality of the software something that the business cares about or not? I am not even sure if incentives are necessary if quality is a part of the culture and is the expectation.

In one gig I was on, the culture was all about features, features and more features. The CEO was pushing this culture hard and it showed. You can imagine the kind of product this resulted in. Huge amounts of technical debt, replicated functionality, a high bug count and very high staff turnover. The customers were not happy at all but he just didn't seem to understand or care.

Also, 7k for image storage is crazy.

The current price insanity has got me to reconsider upgrading a few systems. It made me think of what I actually need vs what I want, never a good idea for consumerism.

That executive has lost any human decency and should be fired.

I don't if you know this, but there was a collection for LXD. Last time I checked, it didn't seem very popular so not maintained very well but it did work. Maybe that could be used for inspiration.

I remember Stéphane worked on adding support for incus containers to opentofu which seemed more popular than using ansible to describe the resources.

VM support has been there for quite a while now and works nicely. I think that's what they're referring to. It started out with only system containers and then gained support for VMs and now there's work to support launching OCI images directly.

Can you elaborate on the "software security that US models" seem to have? According to blog posts I read, the code generated had security problems and naive ones at that. Perhaps it got better now or people have learned not to blindly vibe code applications that are to be used publicly but it certainly didn't feel like there were security guardrails.

Extra impressive considering he has a newborn at home.

As an emacs user and fan, I sometimes feel that emacs is pushed into directions it is not meant to handle but the fact that it can be pushed to do so is its power. It's image handling has taught me that, but it also taught me that I prefer to use "the right tool for the job".

This isn't about the first time ever though. I've been hearing the phrase "get rid of your developers" for a long time now. Let's see. SaaS is all you need, boot camp devs, no code, low code and buying-off-the-shelf-components and I'm sure I'm missing a few. This time, the automation is coming to most industries and will be felt across the economy(ies).