jdbernard

To provide a counterexample, my parents always had a handyman growing up. I think they still do. Not the same guy through all the years, but they've always managed to find one.

LibreWolf can work with Mozilla Sync, they just disable it by default.

Does anyone?

Just because someone else's AI does not align with you, that doesn't mean that it isn't aligned with its owner / instructions.

This is still part of the author's concern. Whoever is responsible for setting up and running this AI has chosen to make completely anonymous, so we can't hold them accountable for their instructions.

Why wouldn't agents need starter issues too in order to get familiar with the code base? Are they only to ramp up human contributors? That gets to the agent's point about being discriminated against. He was not treated like any other newcomer to the project.

Because that's not how these AIs work. You have to remember their operating principles are fundamentally different than human cognition. LLM do not learn from practice, they learn from training. And that word training has a specific meeting in this context. For humans practice is an iterative process where we learn after every step. For LLMS the only real learning happens in the training phase when the weights are adjustable. Once the weights are fixed the AI can't really learn new information, it can just be given new context which affects the output it generates. In theory it is one of the benefits of AI, that it doesn't need to onboard to a new project. It just slurps in all of the code, documentation, and supporting material, and knows everything. It's an immediate expert. That's the selling point. In practice it's not there yet, but this kind of human practice will do nothing to bridge that gap.

Maybe, but even so workflows like this don't exist in a vacuum. We have to work within the constraints of the organizational systems that exist. There are many practices that I personally adopt in my side projects that would have benefited many of my main jobs over the years, but to actually implement them at scale in my workplaces would require me to spend more time managing/politicking than building software. I did eventually go into management for this reason (among others), but that still didn't solve the workflow problem at my old jobs.

The solution is not to deny yourself the tools of persuasion or "manipulation" but to be authentic and transparent. It's deceptiveness that makes influence or persuasion manipulative, not the tools and techniques.

The combination of these things you're mentioning is one of the main reasons, at least for me, that WFH is so much more productive. A lot of tech companies have evolved a culture and built offices that are in opposition to doing good work. Open plan offices have been the norm in my experience over the last 10 years (maybe more). Anytime interruption via Slack/Teams is the typical culture.

I was much more open to working in the office when I actually had my own office.

It seems obvious to me, but there was a camp that thought, at least at one time, that probabilistic next token could be effectively what humans are doing anyways, just scaled up several more orders of magnitude. It always felt obvious to me that there was more to human cognition than just very sophisticated pattern matching, so I'm not surprised that these approaches are hitting walls.

Same. I don't hate it, but I do hate that things changed out from underneath me without any notice, opt-in period, or ability to go back.

They don't deserve punishment. But they should understand that this is not just "their product" but it is also my tool. Tools like this do not need to change and absolutely should not change without there being prior notification. Yes, in many ways the UI changes are trivial. They don't fundamentally change what's possible. But my keyboard never changes on me without input. My workbench doesn't rearrange itself without my input. If they want this to continue to be my tool (I've been happy to pay them for it) it needs to respect my time and attention.

I think it is a result of the impersonal "contact us" intake forms companies have all moved to. You have no indication that you aren't just screaming into the wind. There is no personal touch. So you take to social media where your are sure at least someone hears you. It also scratches the justice itch: if the company doesn't pay attention it looks bad in public and you get some vindication for being ignored.

I'm not saying it's a good or bad thing to do, but I understand it.

I don't use tmux because I have to. I use it because I love the way it works. The issues the author of the article and Kovid Goyal raise are not issues for me in practice. If something is built that better suits my needs, I'll be happy to switch. I am particularly sympathetic to Goyal's gripes about the performance/resource wastes of a multiplexer.

But I also take issue with statements like "terminal multiplexers are a bad idea, do not use them, if at all possible" (from the kitty FAQ and the YouTube video linked in the article). Tmux solves a number of real problems for me that Kitty doesn't. Kitty also seems to be moving in a direction that I am not interested in. It's tied to a windowing system when I want a terminal that I can use headless. Even with the hacky workarounds the article mentions, it doesn't really support session persistence when I use this feature of tmux weekly. It introduces a lot of features that are likely to lead to visual noise when the constraints of text-only are one of the main reasons I like terminals (personally I don't want images in my terminal, full stop).

Now, all of this is fine. It's the other statement, "[tmux acts] as a drag on the ecosystem as a whole, making it very hard to get any new features," that causes it all to rub me the wrong way. The only reason you feel like tmux acts like a drag is because there are users like me who won't switch to something like Kitty if it doesn't support tmux. So don't worry about us. Build a new thing that is not backwards compatible and live with the fact that many people won't use it. If you really want to drive the ecosystem forward as a whole, be less condescending about real use-cases that bring benefit to real users.

To be clear (because text is a limited medium), I'm not grumpy, angry, or against Kitty because of this. But I am dismissive.

This feels like one of those "not obvious until you've seen it in production" requirements: any production-ready logging framework should have a mechanism to delay parameter evaluation until after the threshold/destination checks are performed. Most languages have some version of deferred execution (lazy evaluation, thunks, etc.)

You're getting down-voted, I think, because you're missing the point. I would argue that the "I use Vim, btw" articles are themselves proof that there are still people for whom Vim is actually more performant. Similarly, you don't see people being passed over in hiring because of editor choice because it does but less to consistent results.

Compare to a hand saw. You still see them in specialty work and hobby shops, but you don't see them on construction sites. You see circular saws. Same with hammers. You'll probably still see them in job sites, but with far less usage than nail guns. And in many contexts nail guns have completely replaced hammers. There are still people griping about power tools but the industry doesn't care. I know a fair number of people in the trades and I can't imagine any of them seriously suggesting that you don't need to know how to use power tools.

My argument is that, assuming AI fulfills the expectation of those who hype it (and that assumption has yet to be proven), we will see a similar effect in software. The results will speak for themselves and make the arguments irrelevant. That hasn't happened yet, leaving room for genuine debate.

If the AI actually outperforms humans in the full context of the work, then no, we won't. It will be so much cheaper and faster that businesses won't have to argue at all. Those that adopt them will massively outcompetes those that don't.

However, assuming we are still having this conversation, that alone is proof to me that the AI is not that capable. We're several years into "replace all devs in six months." We will have to continue wait and see it try and do.

but the second one doesn’t, the vowel is still there!

Isn't the "a" in "have" elided along with the "h?"

Shouldn't've Should not have

What am I missing?

Yes it does, it's just dressed up in corporate speak:

Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management.

We think we can be bigger (more customers, more sales, more money) than all existing players.

We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and automation/AI to serve them profitably.

We're looking to eclipse the population of any one country and we're going to use something like Bitcoin to side-step national currencies (and maybe also to avoid existing regulatory structure, not clear from the ambiguous language).

We plan to do with 100 people what Allianz and others do with 100,000.

We believe we can automate or use AI to eliminate the need for people to actually support these billion customers.

All three of those are very bold statements/goals.

The harm I imagine would be the reputation damage from people believing that "they are intentionally trying to mislead people into thinking that they are the developers of VLC." NoahKAndrews, having been informed that these really are the devs of VLC, is hoping his earlier, uninformed statement did not cause too many people to think poorly of VideoLabs.

I hit 40 this year. I have definitely noticed a slowdown even in the last few years. Before 30 I could pull 2-3 all-nighters a week without really feeling any ill effects.

Then, maybe early-to-mid 30's I could only handle one per week, assuming I'd slept well otherwise. The sleep debt would be too high still and the next day I'd get headaches, feel extremely tired and unmotivated. Or I could sustain 2-4hrs of sleep a night for like 3-4 days, but again I'd pay for it if I didn't catch up (pretty sure I'm paying for it long-term anyways).

Here at the end of my 30's I can't really do a full 40-hours straight without sleep anymore (16hr day, 8hr night, 16hr day, then sleep). If I don't get at least 2hrs overnight then that second day is mostly wasted, maybe I get 4hrs out of the 16.

I've always known that sufficient sleep is important for your health, and I've tried to balance times of all-nighters with crashes to catch-up, but the allure of using the night as uninterrupted focus time is so strong when you work in modern corporate "open-plan" environments where always-on Slack/Teams presence is expected during business hours.

>parents have a duty to feed, clothe, house etc them.

But this duty is not because their children don't have money. The duty is because they are family.

I'd like to live in a society where we extend this duty to the society. It is the parent's duty foremost, but we as a society should see this as our duty as well, at the very least for our children (and let's think of it that way, we are in this together, at least when it comes to our children).

A kid could have figured out how to get 3 proper meals a day if they had to figure out how to get food themselves instead of sustaining themselves on a single daily handout.

I'm with you as far as the principle of personal responsibility is concerned, we are all better when everyone contributes, and I agree that we should teach our children this principle. However, the whole reason that, even legally, we don't treat kids as adults is that they are not adults, cannot and should not be held to the same standards. Withholding the basic necessities of life is not the way to teach this principle.

It doesn't even work consistently. I'd argue that many of the people that are fraudulently taking advantage of welfare programs are doing so because they were taught, as kids, that society doesn't care about them. So why should they care about us? Why shouldn't they take advantage of whatever they can? I'm not justifying this position, or even saying it is logically sound, but kids are not adults. If withholding school lunches is your method for "teaching responsibility" it is really ineffective.

Just feed the kids. We're not giving them free Xboxes. We're keeping them healthy and alive so that they can learn.

This is the thing to me. I'm sympathetic to the concern of people taking advantage of others, but if the government is forcing children to be there (which we are), and already having to bear the cost of funding these schools generally, we really should include the cost of basic nutrition for all students as an operating cost, just like the electric bill and teacher's salaries.

Their experience is not universal as I also went to High School in Texas in the early 2000's and not only were we allowed to eat on school grounds, if you were old enough to have a license you could drive off campus for lunch as long as you were back before the next period.

I've been a Caps -> Escape-er for years now. Recently, as I've moved to Walyand and KDE Plasma, I saw that their advanced settings support Caps -> Esc / Ctrl: Esc when pressed, Ctl when held. I've been considering it, especially since I recently broke and replaced my Ctrl key. Inertia holds me back, but I had the same concern before Caps -> Esc.

I misread your original comment. I read "true AGI" where you said "true androids."

I agree. Other than the control system, everything else is already there, or at least understood. But I think we are much farther away from "true intelligence" than AI boosters claim. We don't even know the path to it. We have guesses, but no hard evidence that those guesses will actually pan out.

Lol what. We can't even define "true intelligence" and you're telling me the "mechanics" are already solved? What do you even mean by that statement?

The problem with using fiction as a discourse about possibilities is that fiction is governed by the rules of the author's mind, not the rules of reality. So the fidelity of the model being used to drive the discourse is directly dependent on the congruence between the author's internal model of the world and reality, which can often be deceptively far apart. This is especially bad when the subject is entertaining, because most of us read fiction for entertainment, not logical discourse. So we create scenarios that are entertaining rather than realistic. And the better the author is the more subtle the differences are, but that doesn't mean they go away. It feels like a somewhat common experience in my life that I'm discussing some topic with somebody, and I have subject matter expertise based on actual lived experience, and as the conversation goes on I discover that all of my conversation partner's thinking about the subject was done in the context of a fictional world which misses key elements of the real world that lead to very different conclusions and outcomes.

This is not to totally discard fiction as a way of reasoning. With regard to hypotheticals beyond our current reach it is often the only way to reason. So it's valuable, but we have to keep in mind that a story is just a story. Hard experience trumps fictional logic any day. And I can't assume that the same events in real life will lead to the same outcomes from a story.

Lol, Georgetown isn't really a suburb of Austin. It's a separate city that is almost as old as Austin, home to the oldest college in Texas, and is the seat of an entirely different county. So yeah, there are a few places to gather and get groceries. ;)

This argument is very prone to survivorship bias. Of course, when we think back to the hyped technologies of the past we are going to remember mostly those that justified the hype. The failures get forgotten. The memory of social discourse fades extremely quickly, much faster than, for example, pop culture or entertainment.

I acknowledge that this is an emotional response and emotions tend to be blunt instruments that don't really come with detailed reasons.

how can one, even in theory, make more and more money every year and remain positive for society?

Why is making "more and more money every year" the assumed goal and "remain[ing] positive for society" the thing we have to barter over? Why do we accept, as a culture, the idea of profit is more important that people? That's sad to me.

Is everyone just doing something "wrong" here?

Maybe? Maybe we've created a culture that is fundamentally opposed to our overall well being? I think we have, at least in some respects.

To use your analogy, it's not so much that I am sad it rains sometimes. I'm sad that, knowing it rains, we are happy with companies that sell unsuspecting people homes in floodplains knowing there is a real chance that the inhabitants die in floods. Then when it happens the response is just, "well, that's just how it is, it rains sometimes."

I'm not saying that C.AI is completely blameless here

I know we're several decades into this pattern, but it's sad to me that we've just given up on that idea that businesses should have a net positive impact on society, that we've just decided there is nothing we can or should do about companies that actively exploit us to enrich themselves, that we give them a pass to ignore the obvious detrimental second-order effects of their business model.