atq2119

I sort of see the point about undoing the changes to the clipboard, although it's not actually so simple. The clipboard is system-wide shared state -- what if another application changed the clipboard between the cut and the undo?

The other part of it ("ghosting" the cut) just seems like a matter of taste, and at some point you have to consider whether going against decades of established muscle memory in the users of your software is really worth it.

That said, it is a good idea to re-examine our assumptions every once in a while, so kudos for that.

This is getting a bit off-topic, but there are certainly people who will still say that they built it. That is, in a nutshell, how people try to reconcile desert theory with the existence of the super-wealthy.

Right. There is something interesting here that could be explored thoughtfully. The hard part is that we rely on compilers being correct, and they mostly are.

We have no viable mechanism yet to get the same level of confidence if some LLM-based system writes the binary.

Perhaps we can get to a system that produces not just the binary but also a machine-verifiable proof that the binary implements some higher-level language description of the program.

Though then the question will be whether we've gained anything, or whether we've just replaced the compiler with something massively more expensive that does the same thing.

There's some potential here for the LLM-based system to drive better performance optimizations than a regular compiler could.

Of course this isn't what Elon is actually saying, and we'd be better off if fewer people listened to him.

A dubious analogy.

Factories are places for the mass production of identical or nearly identical widgets.

There are some kinds of mass produced software, like the low value apps that lots of businesses want to have for some reason and that should have been websites instead.

But actual progress comes from software that isn't mass produced. So choose your ambitions wisely.

We can point out mistakes that feel rather grating without assuming intent behind them.

I agree that their use of "he" is likely because they're not a native speaker, especially because they're arguing against the capabilities of LLMs.

That doesn't make it inherently wrong to point out the mistake when it's so intertwined with the deeper discussion here, especially given the fact that some (hopefully few) people do build relationships with LLMs.

That's true, but it does mean that the LLM itself actually does have access to those thinking traces and could therefore, at least in principle, answer what it was thinking. They're probably not trained to do that, though.

It could potentially be falsified by an encounter with really weird aliens.

But I find it quite plausible because it feels like it's fundamentally "just" a restatement or a minor variation of the Church-Turing thesis.

To expand on this, I've found that often, the best way to make a change is in two steps: First, make the change easy (the re-architecture). Second, make the change that is now easy.

My best software development experiences have been in cultures where this way of working was common.

It is a shame that these cultures are not more widely spread; and I mostly blame GitHub: the lack of good support for stacked PRs or patch series or whatever you want to call it makes it harder than it should be to work in this way.

This doesn't actually seem to be true based on a quick googling, i.e. Germany has somewhat higher median income.

But in addition to the raw numbers, you have to keep in mind that they don't account for cost of living and that different countries account for various services differently, especially health care.

The trick is to do something else in those 20 minutes (or, ideally, even longer).

That's the main value I've been getting out of coding agents. I have them do (comparatively) simpler tasks or explorative tasks in the background while I'm in a meeting, doing code reviews, or otherwise working on something else.

That was probably not GP's point, but they can be. Sound-based weapons are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_acoustic_device

Of course a lot of it is about the energy and overall exposure, and the harms of this, if any, are more likely elsewhere, but it's completely reasonable to question extraordinary promises made by people who up to this point have shown no expertise in the field.

I swear, it's like some people have already forgotten about Theranos.

Agree with most of this except come on. Facebook was born out of a misogynist precursor. The idea that its CEO had no malicious intentions is ridiculous.

The straightforward solution to this is to allow the tax to be paid in kind, to be paid into a sovereign wealth fund.

Owe 1M$ in taxes and have ownership stakes in a company worth 1B$? Fine, transfer a 0.1% share of ownership in the company into the SWF.

Of course that is a feature, but at this point I have to suspect that you're willfully ignoring the point.

The moral problems begin when writing that book gives you extraordinary power beyond what is healthy for society (which is extremely rare for authors, of course; the discussion isn't really about authors, you just invoked them in an attempt to conjure a moral shield for the people who are the real problem).

And again, even that in itself is still not a moral failing of the individual. It's primarily a failure of the system in which the individual operates.

It does become a moral failing of the individual if the individual uses that power to perpetuate the system.

Yes, the same is absolutely true for many other professions. And artists are probably more aware than most, at least on average, how much luck plays a role.

But note that I have been very careful not to call the fund managers individually immoral.

Yes, you got it!

It's because while for some people there may be jealousy involved, many more have realized or are now realizing how much power the ultra rich have, and how bad that is for our societies.

Once a company becomes large enough, it becomes so influential in society that control of it must be made more democratic.

I don't think anywhere has figured out quite the right way to go about it yet, but it's clearly the right goal. Some countries require employee representation on the boards of large companies.

Part of it is work, yes. But consider. How much is your take home as a fund manager with 100M AUM? How much is your take home with 10B AUM? The work is the same, yet if the take home is different, you've proven that your income is not in fact earned through work in a moral sense.

The sad part about it, and one that has become a bit of a theme with his postings, is that pg stopped being intellectually honest in his online writings at some point over the last two decades.

His post here in particular violates the fundamental principles of HN in that he does not engage with the argument at all.

The argument isn't that it's impossible to become a billionaire legally, the argument is that it's impossible to become a billionaire in a moral way, though that's more of a problem of the system than it is necessarily one at the individual level. A just and moral system would assign the value being created in such a way that becoming a billionaire would be essentially impossible.

Yet pg never even acknowledged the possibility that that might have been the argument.

Agreed. To put this in perspective, batch 1 token decode is bandwidth limited in theory.

Memory bandwidth of RTX 3090 is listed as 936GB/s. The post isn't fully clear on which model they used and how big it is, but even assuming it perfectly filled the 24GB of that GPU, 30tok/s means the achieved bandwidth is only 720GB/s. There's a bunch of room for improvement here even without MTP, and those improvements should largely stack with MTP.

Interesting to see somebody argue out in the wild for what I have been subjected to in the past and have long considered absolute worst practice.

It may be that my perspective is different because my work tends to be in "hard" foundational software (think OS components and programming language tool chains). It's not that customer requirements aren't a thing at all in that kind of work, but they tend to be far removed from the day-to-day and instead, mechanical sympathy rules supreme.

Commit messages need to focus on the software, not on the trappings of the process by which it evolves. Links to tickets can provide helpful context especially for bug fixes, but they belong in the commit message footer.

Your last paragraph is absolutely an anti-pattern at least in this work. If the implementation of a new feature is split over multiple changes, then surely there is something different and important to say about each of those changes. Does your split even make sense otherwise?

That is definitely not my experience using Claude Code with Opus. I work in a very sparsely commented code base, and the agent produces substantially more comments than the surrounding code.

Of course it does, but that's beside the point.

As a software developer, you must never subject your team mates to a PR that you yourself believe to be low quality. The point of code review by others is to catch things that you missed.

There are multiple lines of defense for quality. Yes, automation can and should be one of them, but your own self-review always has to come before review by your team mates.

That quote shows an utter disregard for basic human decency.

It is the responsibility of the person running the coding agent to make sure the resulting PRs are high quality. Putting that on your team mates, or worse, random open source project maintainers on the internet, is the definition of an extractive contribution.

You may be confusing some abstract unachievable ideal with the reality of the world we live in.

In reality, being superwealthy absolutely comes with a tremendous amount of power.

It is also pretty much the opposite of anarchic, given effects like regulatory capture and politicians pandering to the desires of the wealthy.

This is a genuine problem indeed and part of the appeal of an UBI. The idea being that if the rules of redistribution are dead simple, then that helps minimize the potential for grift, which in turn minimizes the potential danger of a redistributor class.

That said, it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power, and that power changes hands on a regular basis.

At a global scale, this necessitates taking power away from the capitalist class.

Ideally that power just doesn't go to anybody, but to the extent that it has to go somewhere, it almost doesn't matter where. Or perhaps it's better to say that there are many options that are acceptable and better than allowing power to continue to accumulate unchecked.

Unless you're systematically repeating the exact same task, the most parsimonious explanation is that you're seeing natural variation based on different tasks, random sampling of tokens, etc.

It's been a while since I saw a detailed paper on a high end training run, but extrapolating from what I remember, it seems those training runs are in the 10s of trillions of tokens. This already accounts for potentially sampling tokens multiple times during the training run.

That seems like a large number, until you realize that OpenAI claims to have almost a billion weekly users. And OpenRouter shows many models at over a trillion tokens per week.

So in pure token terms, I'd say it is in fact extremely plausible that inference dominates, at least for the popular models.

If the inputs are constant, then all the multiplies are constant and the only thing that toggles is the accumulation. Which explains the pi situation.

Normal vs uniform is less clear, but also not as much of a difference. The arguments about signs isn't just about a signs bit, though. The way you negate during accumulation is that you flip all the bits. Only the final float representation is sign+magnitude, the accumulation itself has two's complement steps. I don't actually know the analysis here, just pointing out that it's not that simple.

Think about it from the other end. Why would any bits flip at all in the data path of your matrix multiplier when all the matrices are 0?

You may be talking past each other. You're talking mostly about quality of life. That is different from being (de)humanized.

Dehumanizing is treating other humans as not, or not fully, human. For example, the term "human resources" is dehumanizing because it puts humans on the same level as other resources. If you're treating humans like you'd treat, I don't know, lithium or the ocean, you're dehumanizing them.

The more humans are treated as numbers on spreadsheets and other forms of computation, the more humans are dehumanized.

So both can be true: we're more dehumanized than in 1900, but while that does impact quality of life negatively, the overall quality of life may still be better than back then.

The question should be whether and how we can have both: overall quality of life without being dehumanized.