asdfman123

Nice work science, but 400 years is a long time to hold onto old grudges. I go by what the "Good Book" says and "forgive and forget."

(sorry guys channeling my ken m)

Lots of state actors criticizing the US too. Bots everywhere.

I've read Burns and I understand what you're trying to say, but that's one of those things that's true but oversimplified to the point of being off-putting. And in and of itself it's not enough: you have to know the full rationale behind CBT.

And maybe more importantly, not everyone benefits from CBT! Sometimes people are unhappy because there's deep emotional work they need to do first.

Only a precious few are so lucky that they don't have secret miseries. So you didn't get lucky -- I didn't either. Gotta take your licks and move on.

Besides, there is a way to transcend that unhappiness. I've seen people meditate their way out of it, but it takes years of study and discipline. The only reason why every psychiatrist doesn't tell you to start doing it is you can't just tell someone to work hard at something, they have to want to do it themselves.

Hi, effective altruist here. I'm going to start a fund to buy your family $50,000 of ice cream a year to maximize total happiness.

I read a great quote by someone, maybe Nietzsche, suggesting that when you encounter that which you struggle with you tell yourself the equivalent of "hell yeah, this is my struggle."

This is prime time. This is what I'm currently on earth to solve. I'm going to enjoy the process of trying to defeat it. Amor fati.

Of course, you don't have to think that way. But you're going to have one problem or another, either way, and that mindset shift just makes everything feel less hopeless and more in control, even if the problem persists for now.

Some things are very easy to solve via code (see https://xkcd.com/1425/), and others are extremely difficult.

Note that comic is about a task that AI has already conclusively solved...

Until we've all finally let go of the past.

Yep, that's definitely true... for now.

The thing that concerns me, however, is that just a year ago it was only useful for doing things like reminding me how to read in a file. Now it's at the level of a competent junior, who can almost do the whole task from start to finish but needs a little supervision.

All the AI companies are retaining the messages we're sending to their agents to train the next models. I wouldn't be surprised if the agents will be able to do what I'm doing in a year or two.

UPDATE: I'm getting a lot of replies to this thread and while I'm not trying to be argumentative here, I have to ask if a lot of them aren't rooted in denial... it's been a hard adjustment process for me too.

Hey there Mr. Jambo

Google promotes people based on shipping features, not making good software. So this breakage means someone is shipping features.

You should be happy for them.

You don't think the US cares about it? You don't think we have talent? We've been vacuuming it up from around the world for years now, much of it directly from China.

I have no doubt China can catch up but to say the US isn't in a competitive position is absurd.

Because that's the only way they win right now.

In the US, why make a scrappy small model when a big tech company will pay you a stupid salary for working on their big one?

Tin foil hat warning: it also pulls inference revenue away from the Antropic/OpenAI and a financial crises at those organizations improves the relative position of Chinese labs

How is that a "tin foil hat" argument? That's how competition works. You want to make your competitors stumble and fall.

It's like unlimited PTO. Take a reasonable amount of PTO and you're fine, but if you actually treat it as unlimited then you'll get fired.

They're doing well because philosophy majors are usually just very smart people.

Not sure if the degree itself is necessarily that helpful beyond signaling intellectual competence.

No good deed goes unpunished

The problem is what they can do is rapidly expanding. Software development is becoming increasingly hands off.

If they get to the point where they're smart enough to make tasteful code decisions based on stakeholder input... we're cooked as a profession.

Brother I used to be a skeptic... using it at Google has been incredible.

Right now I'm only having to direct to enforce good taste. Write tests, don't write an unnecessary function.

It does everything else practically. Presubmit, debugging, commit message generation, commit approval... it's happening.

Sure

Right now the S&P 500 is going wild due to the promise of AI automating everything.

Who is the "we" who is going to shut it down? Certainly not the US government. Nor the Chinese government w.r.t. their tech industry. Are you going to start the insurgency? Is there going to be an equivalent one in every developed part of the world?

You can do that. But I'm telling you, in tech (and enterprise shops I've worked at too) they don't care.

I'm using the internal Google tools and it's helping me write code much faster too, but it still takes time. I could make the CLI tool I work on faster, but no one cares except the end users, and their minor concerns have no impact on our internal politics.

At the end of the day you have to do what you're paid to do, unfortunately.

I think that's a valid point. You could very well be right.

But we're discussing whether we should close the barn door while the horse is three miles down the road.

Developers can develop leaner applications, but they're usually not incentivized to.

Frankly, I love efficiency too, but I've hard to learn the hard way that what the market wants is features. Or at the very least, the executive team wants that.

Personally at my own job self-writing code is letting us tackle big, long-deferred refactoring projects (like the article mentions), but any sort of refactoring introduces new bugs.

Also if you want to try creatine, after a week or so you'll probably gain 2-6 pounds of water weight. Don't be afraid of it, it's not real weight, and will go away within a week or two after stopping it.

And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand.

I see you've found a way to speculatively insult me to save time. (You'll be glad to know that I'm not in that camp -- again, articulating an argument.)

This was well written but it does sort of read as a guy bragging about his wealth and creativity. Good for him but when I leave tech I'm going to be a little less bombastic about it.

I just think that if they studied philosophy at a high level they would just be better at making arguments, not creating pro-social outcomes.

As Hume said, reason is the slave of the passions. E.g. JD Vance read enough history to call Trump "America's Hitler"... but became his VP anyway.

To put it crudely, education gives you tools to identify when people are getting screwed, but it can't force you to care.

I'm just articulating the argument, not saying it's a done deal.

AI can actually make decisions based on open ended information, and if it gets good enough it can fully replace humans.

Will that happen? I don't know. But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance.