ergonaught

Similarish trajectory, and I bought the "new" C64 as soon as it was available and display it proudly. I started with a Vic 20 first (and Gorf), and I learned assembly as soon as I could finish entering all the damn numbers (ie: LADS, via Machine Language for Beginners by Richard Mansfield, the Compute! book), but alllllmost everything in my life is downstream of that Vic 20 and C64.

Loved the ads. Such memories.

It's a well done and thought-provoking article.

The reality is that most humans do very little actual thinking of their own anyway, and, if you believe that what LLMs produce constitutes a form of intelligence, it does seem "more intelligent" than most humans.

So: is outsourcing thinking a net improvement for a majority of users?

I use several models, daily, and they seem "reasonably conditioned" that they are only input to my thinking and not "my thinking". I correct them constantly; they are wrong (in reasoning/logic, in actual facts) frequently. They are demonstrably "not smarter" than I am. And yet I know many people who can "do more" with them as a "thinking" tool. I can say that "the problem" is they can't spot the errors, but they can't or won't do that in their ordinary lives, either, so, again, is it a net improvement for them?

Interesting times and all that.

I asked it a question about indoor carbon dioxide levels (wholly innocuous question), which it flagged as involving biology, therefore downgraded to Opus.

It's a pretty good strategy if they're hoping to fail as a business, I guess.

emacs -nw takes about 2 seconds on my mac. I don't use server/daemon, and those 2 seconds are processing my startup elisp files (it's ready nearly instantly without prepping my junk).

A government sign off on release potentially reduces liability/exposure if the models can do what it says on the box. I’m sure Anthro wants this applied to everyone and not only them, but there is a potential benefit to them.

I'm sure that's a fine take if you decide that "Massively Multiplayer" doesn't mean "Massively Multiplayer".

I guess we'll just call anything MMO now.

Users don’t care

Suppose one proved that a sizable mass of people don't care whether they eat dog food.

There are people who won't feed them dog food even so.

There are people who will see ways to extract more profits.

just a means to an end?

Indeed.

Which means?

Which end?

There are as many unthinking raving fans as there are unthinking raging haters. The reality is that the decision-making power-wielding bunch will make dumb, uncaring, probably some form of "evil", people-harming decisions via AI. Because that is what they do. Almost invariably, until forced to do something else.

So, again, which means? Which end?

This weird "my perspective is universal" thing is among the worst features of humanity in general.

It still amuses me, but Andrei's books were the "last straw" that pushed me away from C++ for many years. Great books, truly, and they helped cement the notion that I wanted to move on to a different language. (Go, at the time.)

The GPL, unlike the BSD and such, intends to prevent the closing of distributed derivative works. LLMs trained on GPL code can produce derivative works without any enforcement mechanism.

You may be fine with that, but the GPL is not a public domain license, and LLM training treats all things as if they were public domain.

I've bought (and cracked open) more programming books in the past year than I had in the previous 10. I'm nobody?

You could have just said “No”, if you had to say anything at all, rather than continuing the behavior.

Actively rude.

If you can't do the job without AI, you can't do the job.

Spoiler alert: if you can't do the job, you're not going to be doing the job much longer.

Adding your own garbage to someone else's URLs is in fact the problem. Could they handle your garbage better? Sure. Is your garbage still a problem? Yes.

"He's old and I don't like what he thinks therefore he is wrong" contributes nothing useful to anyone. Richard's remarks have plenty of gaps to drive a reason train through, but this isn't that.

The sooner you understand the models are not intelligent (yet?), the sooner you can avoid acting like it’s their fault.

Memories! I loved Galway and Hubbard (and tigers and bears oh my etc). They managed to do some really interesting things under the constraints. Still love listening to some of it, today.

Much of the USA accepts "gun deaths" as an unfortunate but acceptable price that must be paid for the widespread freedom to own guns.

When those same people are hysterical about Protecting The Children, you should understand that "protecting the children" is a distraction from whatever the actual intent may be.

The general public is thoughtless, and there's little reason to think the decision-makers are much more thoughtful, but Protecting The Children is merely this age's Trojan Horse.

"The Moral" section seemed to quite explicitly state the "real point".

I would assume this could be described in a formal language

The assumption is the first problem, no? If the formal language is complete, it must be inconsistent. If it is consistent, it must be incomplete. If the language is incomplete or inconsistent, you may be unable to encode dog behavior in it.

In much the same way that buying produce makes you a great farmer.

A few years younger than OP, and started programming somewhere around 1982. The technology is obviously interesting, the capabilities are fascinating. I use LLMs a very large portion of every day.

The problems, as ever, are 1) what negative things are enabled by the technology, 2) do the positive things that are enabled by the technology outweigh those ("is the price worth paying?"), and 3) how much harm will "stupid" and/or "evil" cause as a result of the technology?

And so on.

The fact that a thing is exciting or interesting or stimulating is neat, for sure, but as always there is no relevant thought given to ramifications.

Humans lag well behind technological advancement, and this particular wave is moving faster than perhaps anything else (because prior technological advances enable it, etc).

It's cool that you enjoy it. Me, too. I might enjoy shooting heroin into my eyeballs, too, right up until I don't.

Why the constant chasing after universally applicable generalizations?

Some of them are pandering. Some aren't. Some care. Some don't.

Businesses with ferocious funding needs are vulnerable to pressure (internal and external) to do whatever aligns with money and power. Money and power will flow into the ones so-aligned. That is the nature of the parasitic extraction models that typically drive decision making at those kinds of companies.

Not the first time I've read descriptions of this kind of behavior (let's call it social conformity) presented as perfectly normal, and I read comments (here and elsewhere) that largely confirm this is normal.

It's pathological dysfunction, however common it may be.

I suppose you can't see it when you're in it.

1) "Good idea, terrible implementation". Wrong incentives.

2) "They know the letter of the law, but not the spirit." No common shared understanding of the purpose/point/value motivations.

3) "Time marches on." There is a constant influx of new kids to educate and you can't realistically block the flow without rupturing something.

It seems to be adept at reviewing/editing/critiquing, at least for my use cases. It always has something valuable to contribute from that perspective, but has been comparatively useless otherwise (outside of moats like "exclusive access to things involving YouTube").

Most folks don't seem to think that far down the line, or they haven't caught on to the reality that the people who actually make decisions will make the obvious kind of decisions (ex: fire the humans, cut the pay, etc) that they already make.

The lack of "projects" alone makes their chat interface really unpleasant compared to ChatGPT and Claude.

If you've got a solution to the problem of bad decisions made by people who shouldn't be empowered to make them in the first place, you'll solve more than Claude Code.

Some people want the thing done more than they want to do the thing. That gets to extremes of exploitative parasitic behavior, but it's true at much less obnoxious scales: ever used a programming language's standard library instead of inventing your own _whatever_? Probably a yes.

That can extend to arbitrary absurdity. You are probably not growing your own food, mining your own ore, forging your own tools, etc etc etc.

It's all just a matter of where you rely on external tools/abstractions to do parts of the work you don't want to do yourself.