lqstuart

Not sure what you’re getting at, is that too many or too few? Terraform, building grafana dashboards, building internal UIs, provisioning the networking and dealing with security groups and routing tables, IT stuff like MDM/SSO/OIDC, not to mention the entire data and ML infra is easily 10 engineers. And in a startup they’d all be juniors and do an even more terrible half assed job than Claude. These are all very well established fields with ample documentation online, and honestly pretty simple tasks as long as you have senior people to feed it a design that isn’t stupid.

I’m at a very fast growing startup with real revenue and Fable has let us avoid hiring probably 6-10 full time software engineers with full salary and benefits. We’re spending nowhere close to that. I’m the hiring manager and I’m closing the reqs.

So.. great news for Anthropic, I’ll go ahead and let the elephant in the room go unaddressed

how do massively negative margins "collapse"

I think the gap here variation. Yes, people living 50,000 years ago were likely quite similar to _some_ people alive today, just probably not very similar to the types of people who are able to peacefully sit around on the internet and read history books for pleasure, who would most likely ask that question.

I feel like the real news story is kids protesting against school being closed

It’s almost like they’re interchangeable. We need to start asking these models to solve extremely difficult, contrived DSA coding questions before deciding which ones we employ

I really like your core point. I don't know anything about Suno and that's what people are picking at, but I'll offer a supporting example from pre-LLM days: the number of people who were actually willing to dig through source code was nonexistent. I've worked in ML/AI since forever and I would say roughly 1 in 5 to 1 in 20 developers I've worked alongside were actually willing to just go to Github and look up why code might be failing and get to the bottom of it.

The same is true for LLMs. You can get Claude to spew 2,000 lines of garbage in 15 minutes, but the number of developers actually willing to sit there and reason over the output and make the tweaks--often very minimal tweaks--that make it go from 90% correct to 100% correct are vanishingly few. And it's typically just laziness and a lack of any kind of genuine interest in the field.

MSFT is also forcing its subsidiaries to “lean into AI” so that they can fire people to cover for Satya’s bad investments

Maybe one of the scientists who cashed out 8 figures will file a suit that OpenAI has wronged them by depriving them of the joy of working

This is really cool. One of my favorite parts of the internet is getting to see these kinds of projects by people who aren't afraid to tear into stuff and take it apart and put it back together.

But you do all that for privacy... and then you use CarPlay?

it hurts how true this is

Because LLMs fuck it up near-constantly and I need to review it

Not long ago I started having an issue with my eye. I called around and they said I should get seen ASAP, same day if possible, but it wasn’t worth the ER and it was a five day wait for an appointment.

I was pretty freaked out. During that time, I tried diagnosing it with AI. When I finally got to the appointment, the actual doctor sat down, looked at all the unremarkable images, asked me one (1) question, ordered another image and diagnosed the issue. When I looked back, in all that time, the AI had mentioned it exactly one time early on, ruled it out immediately based on a flawed understanding of the symptoms, and never brought it up again.

Just my anecdotal evidence, but I’d never trust any AI on its own. My doctor can use it if they want, I can’t.

It’s the ER. People aren’t always in a position to “chat” when they go there.

They both suck, but one of them literally harvests organs from political prisoners.

I’m honestly torn on which one I’d pick, but there’s a TON of likely state-sponsored pro-China propaganda on the internet, so I consider it a patriotic duty to push back for the sole reason that we can still freely talk shit about the one (for the time being, as long as you don’t mention the blessed martyr Charlie Kirk), whereas the other blocks the internet and imprisons people for dissent.

Too bad they don't care so much about factory worker safety or slave labor

I had a TI-89 in high school. I was that kid.

The “$500B AI labs” are also predominantly ~200 person Chinese teams…

Buried pretty deep in the article

“The raw output of ChatGPT’s proof was actually quite poor. So it required an expert to kind of sift through and actually understand what it was trying to say,” Lichtman says. But now he and Tao have shortened the proof so that it better distills the LLM’s key insight.

I guess “ChatGPT came up with a novel approach to a problem that later turned out not to be totally stupid and terrible for once” isn’t as catchy of a headline

What do you call the law that you violate when you vibe code an entire website for "List of 'laws' of software engineering" instead of just creating a Wikipedia page for it

My company has four (4) vibe-coded dashboards to monitor AI tool usage.

We have made no revenue, let alone profit from any AI feature. However, some curiously under qualified people have been hired into new “AI” themed roles with seven or eight figure comp, and we seem to be preparing for major layoffs in the next 30-60 days. Presumably those new roles will be safe.

I switched from Windows to Linux because I got a Steam Deck, which caused me to realize that the only games in my library that don't also run flawlessly on Linux are the ones that have invasive anticheat that I'm really not comfortable installing.

Having to enable TPM or device integrity or whatever it is on my own computer just to run my own games is just too much power to hand to some garbage corporation that shits on its users. Rubbed me so far the wrong that way that I gave it up. The fact that Win 11 is no longer just an easy and hands-off solution that "just works" but is bloated with dark patterns and "AI" bullshit certainly helped cement the decision.

you mean the $5 billion they've generated off of the $73 billion they've raised?

yes, because who ever heard of an AI leaking passwords or API keys into source code

if an idea can't be vibecoded in under 10 minutes, it's not worth pursuing. Checks out

Claude Code asked me for blanket permission to ‘rm:*’ and “security find-generic-password” within the same hour or so last week. When I’m ready to quit my job I’ll just let it go hog wild and see if it can get to my next stock vest without getting me fired

This isn’t how deep learning works. You can’t just “adjust weights” for some random user/product.

I feel like even otherwise intelligent people these days think these chatbots are Westworld-like programmable AIs and not pieces of shit that barely run or work. There is no tech monolith that’s getting advanced and gaining new capabilities. There are some very smart people who have switched from building ad recommenders or autonomous vehicles to building KV caches and reinforcement learning systems, and then in a different department there are the same people who built ads systems at whatever big tech company that will build the same shit at OAI etc.

I think I read it's more "hillbilly" English that sounds like Shakespeare? Like coal mining towns where words like "deer" and "bear" are two syllables. Probably a combination of that and eastern seaboard.

I only learned recently that the vowel shift and non-rhotic R's in Britain happened after the colonization of America. Americans still talk "normally" whereas the English got weird. Also why Irish accents sound closer to American than British I think. Linguistics is cool

I love this podcast, I've listened to it all the way through probably ten times.

That acoustic guitar riff followed by "Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome" is how I'll know I'm dead and I've arrived at the gates of heaven

We just haven’t figured out how to use it. You wouldn’t try to create an entire project out of IDE templates, but how many “low code” attempts were there to do just that at some point?

I think there are phases in a project’s lifecycle where it’s more appropriate, at the very beginning and very late. I do not think junior developers should be using it, because it is much much harder to learn and it kills productivity having senior developers review 3000 lines of slop. Just stuff like that needs to be figured out.