kristiandupont

This thread goes into further detail: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...

Oh certainly, I was asking what the benefit would be to the opposite!

I wrote x86 assembly back when we were switching from real mode to protected mode, and I still have a feeling that I would not have been able to answer whatever question you asked there in a way that would satisfy you.

I also could no longer tell you how to balance a binary tree or implement Quicksort.

What would be the benefit of this, besides from looking cool?

You can quit apps from the activity monitor. It really does appear to be simulating an OS underneath. I am blown away.

I don't think it's entirely down to that. They have extremely optimized supply chains: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/h7McXnWRCQY

Very nice! Reminds of this classic, focused mostly on the sounds: https://github.com/ange-yaghi/engine-sim

It is to me. And I agree that the term is losing value because it's becoming ubiquitous but it's the differentiation from the first versions of ChatGPT etc., which were purely user input -> LLM -> output driven.

I know within a second

I am sorry to be pedantic, but the correct phrasing would be "I think I know within a second", which seems like a pretty important distinction.

LLMs-as-AI can only give us probabilistic outputs based on inputs

I am not completely sure what you are saying here, but it sounds like a variation of the "it's just a stochastic parrot" argument, which is reductionist. The human brain is also just a bunch neurons firing.

I think the two complement each other perfectly and will continue to do so. I keep writing AGENTS.md files for soft rules and custom linter rules for hard ones which IMO is the best of both worlds.

I've heard this sentiment repeated and I believe it, but at least the purpose of my own blog is to communicate insights I've had. I almost make a point out of not blogging unless I feel that I have something truly interesting to share. It seems that flipping that around would come at a price.

Come think it, I feel that I have on the other side of this many times: I read a post or watch a video that opens up something in my brain and I get a sort of crush on the author. I read everything they write or watch all their videos. For some authors, I retain interest. But for others, where it seems like they produce regularly in order to maintain the frequency, I lose interest.

The US suffers from Duverger's Law which means that any vote for anything other than one of the two big parties is wasted. In my country, we currently have 17 different parties, each with different variations of policies. Some are outliers, but many of them have or have had power to some degree over the years. Your cable-tv problem still exists, but to a much smaller extent.

What do you mean? It's a way to mitigate a certain attack vector and as far as I can tell, it works as intended given the circumstances it was designed under.

I don't know whether the author has the competence to theorize about these things or not. What I do know is that understanding the intricacies of how LLM's work does not mean that you are likely to understand or foresee societal implications better than anyone else.

Making systems fully deterministic ignores the entire purpose of having agents involved.

That sounds backwards to me. I hope that most places don't see "having agents involved" as the ultimate purpose, but will use agents where it makes sense, i.e. when deterministic systems fall short.

no, at no point would airplanes have been falling out of the sky

The assertion may have been unfounded, but I think it's just as unreasonable to assert the opposite. Bugs have cascading effects and in a sufficiently complex piece of software they can create chaos with unpredictable outcomes.

I am reminded of this course in university where there was a written assignment with a minimum page count. Even at that time, I remember thinking: "If I am able to express everything necessary in just one page, that should give me the absolute top grade!".

The backend for a game is not just an .exe file. It can be a mess of a system that relies on all kinds of services that need maintenance and that one dev who knows how to reset the cache.

I agree that it's shitty that buyers can lose access to a game they bought, but I really struggle to see how this could function practically.

I feel similarly. I really liked React when it came out because compared to the alternatives at the time, it just felt perfect.

I still prefer it over almost everything, including Svelte, Vue and Solid. But I have started using Crank (https://crank.js.org/) which seems a step closer to where I want to end up. However, I have so far only used it for toy projects so I can't speak to how well it will scale, both in terms of performance and DX.

What people mean is obviously that you use JS primitives for looping, branching, conditionals, etc. over some DSL. Everybody knows that the tags are added syntax, there is no conspiracy here.

It reminds me about this video where John Cleese talks about creativity. One of his points is that his work was better than some of his more talented peers simply because he set aside more time to let ideas mature:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g

For one thing, just about every airline in the world is a potential customer.

That seems like a very, very long-winded way of accusing them of "embrace, extend, extinguish"? Which is obviously not falsifiable, but just feels a bit trite at this point, IMO.

I personally switched back to vscode as I started using Claude and Opencode more for the AI flow, and I didn't see much added value any longer. Also, I was incredibly frustrated that they decided to hide the close button and finally, there were weird issues with editor groups spawning at unwanted times. They might be able to fix it, but I felt that they were starting to reach the limits of what you can do with a "live fork".

..assuming that those roles will be performed by humans, that is.

SQLite is a rock solid piece of software that offers a great value prop: in-process database. For locally running apps (desktop or mobile), this makes perfect sense.

However, I genuinely don't see the appeal when you are in a client/server environment. Spinning up Postgres via a container is a one-liner and equally simple for tests (via testcontainers or pglite). The "simple" type system of SQLite feels like nothing but a limitation to me.

I agree that this isn't a very interesting example, but your statement is: "just asking the model to do a simple transform". If you assert that it understand when you ask it things like that, how could anything it produces not fall under the "already in the model" umbrella?

They may not be, but even so they might find themselves in a prisoner's dilemma. I wouldn't rely in this logic for peace of mind.

For short-sighted management, this is all desirable since the sloppy output looks nice in the short term

It was a sobering moment for me when I sat down to look at the places I have worked for over my career of 20-odd years. The correlation between high quality code and economic performance was not just non-existing, it was almost negative. As in: whenever I have worked at a place where engineering felt like a true priority, tech debt was well managed, principles followed, that place was not making any money.

I am not saying that this is a general rule, of course there are many places that perform well and have solid engineering. But what I am saying is that this short-sighted management might not be acting as irrationally as we prefer to think.