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Yes this exact line caught my attention. A sign of genius is being able to simplify and teach. If something really is superhumanly smart, it should be able to bring us along with its thinking and explain why its answers are right.

I think “build vs prompt” is a false binary that frames the argument badly.

There are way more nuanced uses of LLMs than skill-free “write me a facebook clone.” Like, hey LLM, help me develop tests of X, review this design for X, help me articulate what is wrong with the code for X, give me ideas for simplifying X, suggest optimizations for X, help me debug this failure trace for X, help me apply this refactor across all of X, and on and on. Even these are stupid examples that way over simplify.

I’m super proud of the work I’ve created /alongside/ LLMs. I’ll let it build me development aides and such with little oversight and there’s no skill there. But you can use it deliberately and maintain control, and it’s amazing to have a tool that can look through your code with you from so many angles.

I would feel more sad about this if the web wasn’t so rotten to begin with. On average, any random site is just trying to throw ads at you and harass you to subscribe and such.

Ugh. I just went through this ID verification process yesterday and I got it to work on /maybe/ the 8th try. Truly horrible design. Now I’m in a paperwork exchange with some random third party to get the account associated with my LLC. It would be awesome to be able to just write and distribute software, but there’s only one iOS monopoly so what are you going to do but play ball.

No. Theoretically congress could impeach him, but his party has proven they will support him no matter what his crimes. Theoretically his cabinet could remove him with the 25th amendment but they are all complicit and will need pardons for themselves.

Like, this very second?

It’s been ones of months since USA attacked Venzuela. We are openly musing about invading Greenland. We are actively embargoing and threatening to invade Cuba. We are the unhinged aggressor in all of this.

Strong agree. When I started managing there was very little oversight. It wasn’t perfect and we went a bit astray, and we also did phenomenal work and had everyone on the team deeply engaged and moving with autonomy.

On my second team, the visibility theater took over, upper management set and reset and reset and reset our direction, and nobody was happy. In retrospect, I should have said no immediately. Trusting and empowering your people is hard to beat.

I think this is mostly right.

In a blameless postmortem style process, you would look at not just the mistake itself but the factors influencing the mistake and how to mitigate them. E.g., doctor was tired AND the hospital demanded long hours AND the industry has normalized this.

So yes, the programmers need to hold the line AND ALSO the velocity of the tool makes it easy to get tired AND and its confidence and often-good results promote laziness or maybe folks just don’t know better AND it can thrash your context and bounce you around the code base making it hard to remember the subtleties AND on and on.

Anyway, strong agree on “dude, review better” as a key part of the answer. Also work on all this other stuff and understand the cost of VeLOciTy…

Great list. Invented Concept Labels is the one I think I get most frustrated by. When exploring new areas, I’ll read its paragraphs of acronyms and weird words and think I just don’t know some term of art, and as soon as I ask for a definition it’s like, “I just made that up, that’s not a formal term, blah blah blah.”

The matrix framing is a very nice and way to put it. This morning I asked my assistant to code up a nice debugger for a particular flow in my application. It’s much better than I would have had time/patience to build myself for a nice-to-have.

100%. Even beyond the direct incarceration costs and the opportunity cost of their lost contributions, there is also the cost of the whole apparatus for arresting and charging folks with crimes and trying them. The police department alone is more than 1/3 of our budget in Austin. Add courts and forensics and it’s 40%. And that’s still just the money part, to say nothing of the moral impact and humanity we throw away.

The specification task is indeed a lot of work. Driving the tool to complete the proof is often also a lot of work. There are many fully automatic proof tools. Even the simplest like SAT solvers run into very hard computational complexity limits. Many “interactive” provers are more expressive and allow a human to help guide the tool to the proof. That takes intuition, engineering, etc.

Yes. Love it for quick explorations of available options, reviewing my work, having it propose tests, getting its help with debugging, and all kinds of general subject matter questions. I don’t trust it to write anything important but it can help with a sketch.

I wonder what percentage of our feelings on the spectrum of “ok yeah makes sense” vs “omg how could this happen” is even based on the actual marriage.

GP’s comment vs yours mirror my brother’s reaction vs my reaction when our parents divorced. Same divorce, completely different feelings about it.