atomicnature

Why is it bad? 90% thought is not productive or low value (distractions, routine work, etc, etc). You may think something else, something more useful, and with the full power of "thoughtware" backing you.

It's his website -- official I think.

Just a question to people who may know better than me about this.

I thought the whole point of trying to write out TLA+ is so that you get a better idea of what you want and put it into formal language?

I get that an LLM can assist/help with expressing what we want in formal language a bit, but if one automates all this there is no human intent/design anymore.

If the LLM generates both the design (TLA+) and writes an arbitrary program that satisfies said design -- what exactly have we proved?

What assurance do humans get since human doesn't know or cannot specify what they want.

What's the difference as you see it?

If you read the article carefully -- I've dealt with an alternative scenario as well -- where we may have smaller codebases with larger blast radius.

As to disposable software, it's harder to get traction/adaption when things constantly break or are slow or the experience is crappy in general.

To make it simpler - all else being equal - as a user would you prefer using highly reviewed/vetted/reliable software, or otherwise?

My bet is reliability is an invariant -- nobody wishes for software that crashes, leaks your private info, gives faulty output, is laggy to use and so on.

Try git-lrc, totally free since it uses gemini key. Triggers reviews automatically on git commit.

Specification languages need big investments essentially - both in technical and educational terms.

Consider something like TLA+. How can we make things such as that - be useful in an LLM orchestration framework, be human friendly - that'd be the question I ask.

So the developer will verify just the spec, and let the LLM match against it in a tougher way than it is possible to do now.

AI code review has genuinely helpful - especially when we generate code with copilot, etc.

Many times, these GenAI tools can delete/modify code mistakenly.

I use LiveReview's git precommit features - so the review happens right before I commit code automatically. And it has saved me many (100s of) times.

Give LiveReview's Precommit checks a try.

Go concrete. In FAANG engineering jobs now what % is this factory designer category vs what % is writing some mundane glue code, moving data around in CRUD calls, or putting in a monitoring metric etc?

Once you look at the present engineering org compositions see what's the error in thinking.

There are other analogy issues in your response which I won't nitpick

I don't agree with the limited point about fast fashion/enthittification, etc.

Quick check: Do you want to go back to pre-industrial era then - when according to you, you had better options for clothing?

Personally, I wouldn't want that - because I believe as a customer, I am better served now (cost/benefit wise) than then.

As to the point about recursive quality decline - I don't take it seriously, I believe in human ingenuity, and believe humans will overcome these obstacles and over time deliver higher quality results at bigger scale/lower costs/faster time cycles.

Where have I said engineers/architects aren't necessary? My point is that it is easier to get AI to get better than try to improve a million developers. Isn't that a straightforward point?

What the role of an engineer in the new context - I am not speculating on.

This is the "artisanal clothing argument".

I'd think there'll be a dip in code quality (compared to human) initially due to "AI machinery" due to its immaturity. But over-time on a mass-scale - we are going to see an improvement in the quality of software artifacts.

It is easier to 'discipline' the top 5 AI agents in the planet - rather than try to get a million distributed devs ("artisans") to produce high quality results.

It's like in the clothing or manufacturing industry I think. Artisans were able to produce better individual results than the average industry machinery, at least initially. But overtime - industry machinery could match the average artisan or even beat the average, while decisively beating in scale, speed, energy efficiency and so on.

It was available earlier. Here's the HN history:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Chomsky%20and%20the%20Two%20Cu...

The oldest submission is from 15 y.o ago - that is 2010.

I resubmitted it - thinking - with the success of LLMs - felt this was worth a revisit from "how real-world scientific progress works" point of view.

You can look into Judea Pearl's definitions of causality for more information.

Pearl defines a ladder of causation:

1. Seeing (association) 2. Doing (intervention) 3. Imagining (counterfactuals)

In his view - most ML algos are at level 1 - they look at data and draw associations, and "agents" have started some steps in level 2 - doing.

The smartest of humans operate mostly in level (3) of abstractions - where they see things, gain experience, and later build up a "strong causal model" of the world and become capable of answering "what if" questions.

Only one thing comes to mind:

The species as a whole will evolve inevitably; the individual animal may not.

Leslie Lamport built latex, most of distributed systems such as AWS services depend on formal verification. The job of Science here is to help Engineering with managing complexity and scale. The researchers are doing their jobs

Why do you think developer enjoyment is orthogonal to productivity and delivery?

Willful ignorance is a different process. Consider a food analogy.

Of the food we take - cells accept a % of it as nutrients and such, rest is discarded as waste. The cells know how to get this job done - it's a very complex process for sure.

I think it's the same with information content - a % actually is useful for making life happen - whereas the rest should ideally be discarded because it is meaningless from a life perspective. The mind just knows what's important most of the time.

In this case - willful ignorance would be something like intermittent fasting or regulating food intake carefully, since it is a conscious process.

The former process is unconscious and operates at the "cell level" whereas the latter is a conscious process that operates at the "whole-being" level.

1. The survey seems limited to UK or so. Not sure - it doesn't look like a global report.

2. Don't confuse "enjoyment" with "number of readers". The previous generation may have enjoyed it more - because there were no better options.

3. People over the globe are more educated now, and engaged in knowledge work. They must read to get work done.

4. Don't forget the "pirate book" scene - such as lib gen, Anna's archive, etc. - in developing countries.

Book sales in general (across all formats) are up I think - so there are still many, many readers around. We just have many new formats (EPUB, audiobooks, reader devices, etc.) and of course population is increasing over the globe. I'm pretty sure we have the highest number of readers on the planet right now than ever before in absolute terms.

Will this be open source?

You seem challenged with having a basic discussion without resorting to baseless personal attacks. HN discussions have nosedived in quality over the time. Feel like I'm on reddit.

On the topic - here were my original points (with some extensions):

1. I want a smalltalk-like environment but with modern languages (webassembly makes this technically possible)

2. Alan Kay himself agrees smalltalk is no longer relevant in a concrete manner anymore - it's too old and outdated. The library support is absymal, and LLMs etc won't be as helpful as modern langs, since the training data available is less in quantity and quality. And I am in line with Dr. Kay's view - Smalltalk is indeed too old. I feel the same way about using Lisp for my particular goals.

3. I am not complaining in any way - just stating my requirements in explicit terms. Also I dont consider myself a "user". I am a system builder. I am fully capable of doing things myself if there's no alternative available.

I've seen this already - but Lisp seems a bit limiting. I'd have loved to use Py/Go or JS in the least - something more upto date.

Smalltalk is too old. I'd rather program in Python/Golang - or worst case JS these days.

Interesting stuff - none of these seem to have that Smalltalk-like visual IDE bolted right into them.

Given how big and important a platform the modern web is - I really am starting to think - something like this should exist - where I have a neat little IDE bundled right within the browser using which I can evolve the browser...

Amazon still has huge R&D spends, always had. Bezos had a dictum around having a high experimentation (and failure) rate as a matter of principle. They may not be making news-making moves, but I'm sure they'll develop the muscle in AI. Probably - just really honing on the customer use cases and working backwards over the long term.

Proof != evidence. In evidence, we corroborate, collate, add more sources, weigh evidence, judge. Proof is a totally different process. Only in the mathematical do one prove something, everywhere else we build up evidence, corroborate, etc.

The leading indicator of future market impact is programming and software engineering productivity increasing by 10x on the producer side.

The effects of these productivity gains will take time to materialize on the consumer side.

Try finding PhD Students and see if you can help with their programming or experiments. You'll learn more about how to do research from a PhD student in months, rather than struggling on your own. Once you have the "learning to learn" chops, you're free to study anything you want at incredible depth.

It's amazing.

I've wanted a small prompt-manager chrome extension for a while.

Was procrastinating.

Was able to build one for myself with Firebase studio in 30 mins.

Here's my PromptPal - built in just 30m (disable ad-blocker to avoid issues - there's some interference for some reason):

https://9000-idx-studio-1744253706406.cluster-fkltigo73ncaix...

No frustration whatsoever

Their prototyper is awesome

And code mode also great

I was able to push to github as well with no problems. And the tool generates nice commits for every single change one makes.