spprashant

It took me this map to realize the capital of Sri Lanka is Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, and not Colombo as I thought for over 30 years.

Always interesting to find capital cities which are in fact not the most famous cities from that country. Makes for great trivia questions.

Couple of anecdotes from the last week.

Yesterday the Gmail virus scanner stopped working. For a while I couldn't download my attachments. A few minutes later it said the virus scanner was offline and download at your own risk.

Meet audio seems to be having a particularly bad week. It just doesn't work with headphones. Their testing tool indicated everything was fine. It's worked after I logged off and on. Audio quality issues are getting more common as well.

I do wish they had left a window open for criteria to whitelist developers who can create PRs. By closing off their developer circle, they are losing the best parts of open-source - new software developers eager to solve large problems with novel approaches.

Its in a weird space right now.

These models are actually extremely good but they are far from an intelligence unto themselves. Truth is if someone told you they could build these things 5 years ago, you d write them a check for a trillion dollars. Problem is once we got them, we realized they are not all that. Its like a mecha suit in a universe, where mecha suits are abundant and cheap. Someone has to climb into them everyday and put in the work for it to be effective.

So now the skeptics are saying this technology is overrated. And the optimists are accusing the skeptics of moving goal posts.

Outside of coding what other tools expend that kind of tokens? People are not creating that many slide decks or videos are they?

I really doubt that 400M number. They try to get me to login to Threads see comments on Instagram posts. Technically I am monthly "active" user, but not really.

I see more Bluesky links in the wild than Threads and they claim only 27M users.

The only thing scary is that federal government interns have discovered how to one-shot shitty web apps.

I guess that first piece was important to me. I actually assumed, based on statements Musk has made in the past, that they are purely working off cameras and AI. Isn't that his whole pitch as to why Tesla FSD will scale out faster than waymo?

I believe there is some level of deception there that needs to be stated.

I agree. With Altman at least it seems he is making the pivot because he thinks its better messaging. Amodei is just re-framing what he actually sees as the endgame here. He says 10x productivity, he means 10x less jobs.

I love Sonnet 4.6 so much.

If it spends 2x tokens to achieve the same result, that's effective 2x cost in a manner of speaking

Looks like they land at the average number of 67% disagreement.

Sounds about as sane as you could possibly be given the climate.

So it largely sounds like many more people will be able to write software - and will use AI to do it. Existing software engineers will continue to automate their tasks away like they always did, but perhaps at a faster rate.

The impact of AI in other fields seems to be muted.

AI psychosis just a lazy term, much like Trump Derangement Syndrome.

It sounds hostile while also removing any scope for productive discourse.

Once you call someone a 'psycho', they are less likely to engage with you, and more likely to double down on their views.

Companies are also pivoting away from mere outsourcing to setting up entire GCCs in there.

"offshore Indian devs" are no slouches. They have access to the same GPT models and likely cost a tenth of the median US salary. Businesses are always looking to lower marginal cost. They will hire 1 software architect in US to write specs and 10 software developers in India to babysit 100 agents.

Have we perhaps hyped Jony Ive a little too much?

As with many things, users will discover a happy medium. There is scope for a lot of productivity gain here if the C-suite is willing to understand the tech and work with engineers rather than whatever Dario Amodei is selling.

538 was fun while it lasted. The podcasts were also a good listen.

Things got worse after Disney had their first round of layoffs. Their problem was they weren't profitable outside the presidential election years when interest peaked in the general public. 3 out of 4 years only diehard election polling wonks tuned in.

Good old Goodhart's law. https://xkcd.com/2899/

Github just won't respond at all.

I have never attempted something so ambitious with AI, but this feels spot on in terms of experience. As you cede more control to the model, you will find yourself losing control on things like code quality and performance.

Why even bother announcing an hardware product if you are not even going to mention the specs?

We are supposed to buy this because.. AI?

Having type hints as a feature is not the same as using them.

> Python is, thus, clearly superior to other languages in terms of ease of review.

My experience has not been this. Dynamic languages make it harder to figure out things locally, unless someone has done the hard work of adding type hints.

I feel very lost in these threads. A lot of people talk about getting bad results from gpt 5.5 xH or Opus 4.7 xH.

And here I am daily driving Sonnet 4.6 with medium or high thinking. I actually am thoroughly satisfied with the work it does. Perhaps it has to do with the bite sized pieces of work I give it, that fits better with my workflow.

This seems kind of a critical point in time. I consider Cloudflare to be one of the more serious engineering organizations based on the quality of the products. Assuming they are not lying, them cutting 20% workforce citing AI signals there is actual teeth to this AI optimism.

On the other hand "only" 20% for the foreseeable feature is good news? It means there is ceiling to productivity that AI offers.

Or perhaps I am giving Matthew Prince too much credit here, and this is just an opportunistic cost cutting measure.

I d like to know what exactly Coinbase has shipped with this addition to productivity.

Can you elaborate? I happen to know nothing about Banksy's political views beyond perhaps he is slightly leaning to the left, maybe anti-capitalist?