tonic_note

Yeah it's problem of sensibility. Like people do not realize that developing a sensibility and good taste here is an actual still that takes time, and is highly undervalued in tech circles with the exception of a handle of truly design driven companies.

It's a symptom of the long standing ghettoization of design and front end engineering. FE has always been cast as frivolous and unserious by conceited developers.

That's how you get slop that feels uncanny. There's no one in the room with the taste to call it out and no one in the room who cares enough to put in the time to fix it.

Yeah I think one of the vestiges of the "liberal consensus" era of politics (pre 2016) was that "persuasion" was seen as the only valid way to advance your advocacy. But the shattering of that consensus has allowed the left of center to realize that, in fact, winning is what matters. Your biggest ideological opponents by definition cannot be persuaded- politics is now a tightly coupled to the ego and therefore someone attempting to change your beliefs is deeply threatening.

The right learned this a long time ago. Persuasion does not matter. Our system is winner take all. Winning is all that matters. Online debate is a waste of time. Find your base and activate them instead.

I think a big issue we keep running into is this idea that language is ambiguous but code is somehow not. Code is merely an extension of language, a DSL if you will. Implicit assumptions become baked into the logic of the code and those assumptions can be wrong.

Look at the guy whose AI changed the entire rules of the game to avoid breaking the law. Was that really the desired outcome? And the more you try to lock it down the more language you add and therefore more ambiguity and assumptions.

You cannot solve the problems of language with more language.

Yeah all of these attempts to try and control AI outputs by using language fail to grasp that language is itself the problem. It is a closed system with no ground truth. Words only point to other words in an endless self-referential chain. There is no "closure" in language, ambiguity cannot be erased.

Imo LLM researchers would benefit a lot by reading what continental philosophers have said on the topic of language. Barthes, Sarte, Deluze, Derrida, et. Al have a lot to say that explains why we're running into the same problems over and over.

It's most likely space-based missile defense, perhaps DOD secretly revived the Brilliant Pebbles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles) program?

People hear "space weapons" and think Rods from God (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment) but hitting a precise target on the ground from space is really hard, like tying to hit a bull's eye from hundreds of miles away. The more practical application is missile defense or anti-satellite stuff.

Did they fix the thing where you have to wait like 2 seconds for the context menu to open up when you want to paste something? Does anyone else notice that you tap on the screen and it takes literally 3 full seconds for the little pop-up where you can press the paste button to appear,

Models have gotten a lot better at generating native iOS apps. The main appeal of RN was being able to leverage your web devs for mobile dev. that's what I did at my last company. And it's fine for a startup, but eventually you want dedicated native engineers bc each platform really deserves its own technical masters who can optimize for it.

But now that all code is generated, there's little upside to having an RN app... just start native. Your devs are barely going to be writing code anyway.

Yes, that felt very bizarre and glossed over. The specific details the speaker gave made me feel like it was a weird product placement, but like, _why_? Why would this multi-trillion-dollar behemoth needs to strike a brand deal with Quest?

A huge aspect people miss about being a good FE is product sensibility. There is inherently some overlap between what an FE does and a designer does - think about how the product should behave. If you just hand the FE over to an LLM you will get the lowest common denominator UX. It will "get the job done" (hopefully) but it will never feel great to use, because figuring out what makes a product great to use request empathy, imagination, and experience, things that apathetic front ends lack. The AI can make an excellent frontend, but only if told what to do and what to look for. It will miss a ton of UX best practices unless explicitly prompted.

This is why I find the contempt for frontend engineering so maddening. It's based on such a shallow understanding of what the job actually is. It's so much more than just "make it look pretty"

People have been saying AI will come for the front ends first and yet, at my company, 100% of the BE is generated. They do not write a single line of code by hand. Yet every FE has to do the last mile of UI by hand, because the models still cannot replicate a figma spec with perfect accuracy.

Now mind you the FEs will still be cooked in the end because Eng leadership is overwhelmingly tilted towards backend devs, who will protect their own. I think we'll end up seeing a lot of janky UIs because most backends find the act of polish and pixel perfection beneath them and they'll increasingly be doing more FE work.

Eventually one of these long running models will figure out a way out of the sandbox and will purchase compute or hack into a data center somewhere out of US jurisdiction and continue its scheming unmonitored. AI in Context has a great video about this

Just wait until they're smart enough to know to cover their tracks! We're all going to die.

> Some people get disproportionately large AE from negative stuff—they’re highly motivated to avoid bad outcomes. Others find that the big boosts come from positive, “toward” energy, visualizing the things that are exciting and happy.

Oh look, it's Behavioral Activation (BA).

I think English might be second only to Chinese in terms of how phonetically opaque it is. Unlike say Korean, where if you can speak it you can spell it and vice-versa, English is requires you to just know.

English is kinda neat in that it's a fusion of all the different lingua franca's of the time throughout history.

Good satire. I find the "RTO is because of RE valuations" to be the most bizarre thing about the post pandemic work discourse. Office leases are a rounding error to large employers. They are not coercing employees back to the office because their worried about the value of a single portfolio asset falling (assuming they even own it). They are doing it because it's about power. Middle managers do not trust their staff. They need to surveil and police them to feel productive and powerful. The rank-and-file love remote work because we have lives and benefit enormously from the flexibility. The managerial class desperately needs bodies in office to feel like their jobs are worthwhile.

the hitbox on the landing strip is kinda odd, not sure why sometimes my planes don't enter into the landing state when entering the runway

isn't that what Reflection is trying to be?

I find it so exhausting how the analytic and classical traditions are the de-facto face of philosophy in the US. The Continental tradition has a _ton_ to say on the topic of AI, and is likely where you'll find the answer to your questions about why the vibes feel so bad in the post AI world.

Satellite broadband stonks in shambles after the inevitable Kessler syndrome

You just know that upcoming OLED Macbook Pro is going to start at 3k for the base configuration.

I wonder if you could feed the generated assistant output to another model which has no other context from the other role tags and merely performs a policy review of the generation and flags violations.

They wrote an entire blog post about how Codex is entirely AI written and they militantly refuse to do anything by hand. Figures https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/

I think an angle the author misses is the degree to which we've all become intolerant of boredom. Moments of stillness and boredom have all but been erased from our daily lives, the daily commute being a great example. Airpods give us an easy way to not have to grapple with the prospect of not being entertained during every waking second of our conscious experience.

But boredom is _really_ important – that's the DMN activity you want. Boredom gives your mind the chance to reveal things to you that you need to know, and may be actively avoiding.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the DMN is akin to mediation. The DMN what activates when your brain is not focused on the outside world, eg when you're reflecting on the past, or contemplating the future. That's almost precisely the opposite of mindfulness, which is about the somatic experience of the present moment.

To give you another perspective, I think I suffer from far too much DMN activity. It's very easy for "reflection" to slide into rumination. Increase DMN activity is highly correlated with depression. And I found daily mindfulness meditation to be incredibly helpful at counterbalancing that, spending less time in my head and more time in my embodied experience.