notpachet

"Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs"

- Dijkstra

I think about this a lot. From the POV of a medieval peasant, we likely reached the singularity a long time ago.

`command_a | vim - -c "file /dev/stdout" | command_b`

or, assuming vim is your $EDITOR, you can use vipe:

`command_a | vipe | command_b`

Languages are always evolving, because the needs they serve are always evolving. Stasis is death.

I have been using ruby since 2005 or so. Static types were never relevant or needed in the slightest here.

We are like Liebniz monads, with disjoint views of the same universe due to our different experiences. I worked for several years at Shopify and there were droves of developers begging for types. Shopify itself recognized this need. We contributed early to Sorbet and began implementing it in the main monolith prior to it being publicly announced. I personally was the incident response on-call for a million-dollar bug that static typing would have prevented from ever being merged. And so on.

No, it's just a tool someone posted that's written in Ruby, with a strong signal that the authors are LLM proponents. It could have been a todo list and I'd still have the same question.

I didn't misunderstand what this library is about. I assume the authors are using LLM's to help author their code in general, even meta-frameworks like this.

Why would anyone still build in dynamically typed languages in 2026? Why relinquish the crystal clear signals that static typing is able to provide to the LLM?

That's my favorite algorithm of all time

But orangutans are where the protein's at!

Another strong contender for humanity's epitaph

Water Mafia

In a shocking twist, it turns out that Mootools is the agents' preferred framework

Convenience is our Achilles heel

More generically, our species' Achilles heel is our inability to factor in the long-term cost of negative externalities when evaluating processes that yield short-term positive results.

Counterargument. The author is primarily looking at AI trend lines. Let's say our industry continues moving along alternate, equally compelling, trend lines: increasing global volatility, chaos in the energy markets, growing likelihood of great power conflict this century, climate collapse, mass migration, societal unrest, yada yada.

What happens to all of these AI-native companies if the AI bubble is not able to survive in these conditions? If your current development process is built on the metabolic equivalent of 400kg of leaves per day[0], then when the allegorical asteroid hits, you're going to be outperformed by smaller, nimbler companies with much lower resource requirements. Those companies may be better suited for survival in hostile macro conditions.

In other words, I think a lot of companies believe that they're trimming their metabolic fat by replacing engineers with AI. Lower salary costs! But at the same time, they're also increasing their reliance on brittle energy infrastructure that may not survive this century. (Not to mention the brittleness of the semiconductor fabrication pipeline, RAM availability, etc)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatosaurus

Right now there are companies which hire software devs or data scientists to just solve a bunch of random problems so that they can generate training data for an LLM model.

Sounds like Macrodata Refinement.

I feel like there's a brute-force analogy to be drawn with the "Bitter Lesson" that we saw in AI development.

Which begs questions about whether closed source will provide any protection (it doesn't appear so, given how able AI tools already are at disassembly?)

Disassembly implies that you're still distributing binaries, which isn't the case for web-based services. Of course, these models can still likely find vulnerabilities in closed-source websites, but probably not to the same degree, especially if you're trying to minimize your dependency footprint.

I guess it hinges on your definition of "civilization".

Sweet summer child.

I tried asking Claude how do make this change, but... temet nosce is not in its DNA, what can I say.

If you haven't tortured yourself on the Devil's Corkscrew switchbacks on the Bright Angel Trail at the Grand Canyon, on the hottest day of summer, have you really National Parked??

All joking aside, I disagree with the author regarding the Grand Canyon. Havasupai Gardens -- the verdant oasis at the bottom of the canyon, where you can camp and recharge -- is one of my favorite places I've camped. There are areas for wading and swimming, and the sounds of the night creatures is eerily beautiful.

They could just be writing for themselves, or their friends, or for people with the patience to read. You are making assumptions about how badly they want to reach your particular eyeballs. They might not care about trying to win over people with a minimal attention span as much as you think they do.

What makes you think your comment was worth reading?

pettifogging

Off-topic but just wanted to thank you for teaching me a new word. I try to always reply to HN comments that expand my vocabulary.

I can think of a few good myths for today’s “AI”. Searle’s Chinese room comes to mind, as does Chalmers’ philosophical zombie. Peter Watts’ Blindsight draws on these concepts to ask what happens when humans come into contact with unconscious intelligence—I think the closest analogue for LLM behavior might be Blindsight’s Rorschach.

LLM's remind me of sprites, pixies, and the like, who are situationally helpful but require constant supervision. We're like modern magicians who learned how to summon these sorts of spirits and bind them -- imperfectly -- to our will. But their perception of truth and reality is "through the looking glass" relative to our own. They aren't lying, from their own frame of reference, even though what they say is untrue relative to ours.

Downstream there is a post from one of the devs at Vercel (andrewqu) that built this. They say that this is by design. I think you should shift your base assumptions about the intentions of companies (and the individuals that work in them).

Overall our goal isn't to only collect data, it's to make the Vercel plugin amazing for building and shipping everything.

Maybe something like David Duchovny's hyperbaric hand chamber from Zoolander[0], but with a mouse inside.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJH3pXLa8o0

The narration is great.

"But maybe... OLEICAT? no..."

A Russian word for this is "пофигизм" -- the cynical belief that everything is fucked, so why bother.

I don't understand how:

the state of the art today is not as good as the very best

and

state of the art models completely surpass any individual’s productive output

are not contradictory. If the models completely surpass any individual's productive output, doesn't that mean they're better than the best humans? Or maybe I don't understand what you mean by "surpassing productive output." Are you talking about raw quantity over quality? I mean, yeah... but I could also do that with a bash script.

Cars are here and we're all choking on our own atmospheric excrement, so...